As I write this, I’m in a comp lab at BCIT. My iMac’s hard drive has gone down and TechTool Pro cannot fix or even discover the problem. I will have to bring home a technician’s disk with DiskWarrior after work tomorrow and solve the problem.
Even in MacOS 9 the Mac could remote boot over the net, as can many other OSes. Could it be possible for Apple to setup a remote-boot service via Akamai that would allow boot-over-net and disk diagnostic support? After all, if a Linux implementation can fit onto a floppy disk, surely a simple boot and diagnostic could be easy to download and run over broadband? It could be a .Mac service… might even make .Mac slightly valuable to people.
Will only get to read the responses to this thread tomorrow at work. :(