It's been three weeks exactly (well, almost), and my new iMac i7 27" went to the repair shop.. (*sniff*).
The iMac booted normally this morning, but after a couple of minutes, the fans started kicking in. A new sensation for me. I have never heard a fan in this, or my other (i)Macs. At first I thought that my external drive (Drobo) started making the noise, but the Drobo was silent.
Turned out the fans in my iMac started blowing (hard), and the airflow was relatively warm. Too warm for a Mac which has been switched on for about 10 minutes with no real CPU intensive tasks running.
First I checked the Activity Monitor and 'Top' in the Terminal app to see if there was some program that consumed too many CPU cycles. Nothing there. On average, the CPU was 3% busy.
Next thing to do was resetting the PRAM/NVRAM by holding the Option-Command-R-P combination during a power-on of the iMac. This also made no difference (booting went a bit faster though).
After the desktop appeared, I noticed that my secondary drive (the 1TB SATA) was missing from my Desktop...., and the Disk Utility, and every other tool I could find. The drive was nowhere to be found. Time to call Apple, and ask what they had done with my drive :-)
Apple recommened to boot from the original Application DVD (by pressing 'D' during power on), and run the diagnostics program. Note, checking 16GB of RAM takes a few minutes to pass.
Somewhere during the Logic Board testing the test stopped with a Hardware Failure (forgot to record the exact error id). This meant one thing; the iMac was in desperate need for a repair.
Getting a Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) on the phone on a Monday morning is not easy. Most of them start (picking up the phone) around lunch. After some phone calls I ended with the AASP Leliveld in Utrecht.
I dropped of my iMac and my waited while my iMac was cleared in with a nice cup of coffee. During the wait I got a chance to inspect their work area (they have a large glass wall, so you can see them work on everything Apple). There were several 27"iMacs in for repairs. Something that didn't make too happy. I just hope that my problem is something 27" iMac related, like the display problems on the first batches. Google-ing didn't reveal anything spectacular. Most of the hits are display related.
First impression of this AASP is above average. It must have been the combination of no waiting line, and the customer attention. Downside was that the time to repair was about 1 week, depending on the problem and availability of the parts. So all I can do is wait for the phone to ring, and connect my 24" Dell screen to my MacBook....
Will post a follow-up when the iMac is back from repairs.