New iMac, startup failure, question mark: TH00-9.000 TH0O-9.000

Hi everyone!
My new alu iMac worked for 3 weeks. Today it suddenly crashed. Now the boot process stops with a flashing question mark.
Disk Repair didn't find any harddisks to repair.
System Profiler stated "There was an error while scanning for Serial-ATA devices."
AHT reports the following error code: 4sns/1/40000000: TH00-9.000 harddisk failure.
The error appears during (or after) the main logic board test while the fans spin up.
Looking closely the space between the zeros in TH00 is significantly smaller. So maybe it's not a zero but an upper case O.

Please look over the following Apple Advice letter:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1440
My guess is the internal HD has crashed, this of course would be covered by your 1 year warranty so you should contact Apple immediately for repair. Please remember hard drives are not made by Apple and they do fail. Some last weeks some last 10 years, unfortunately they are very unpredictable. While this is frustrating this is why you have a warranty. If you have been using Time Machine then once the internal drive has been replaced restoring will be painless with TM.
If you have added an external HD or have a flash drive inserted in one of the USB slots that can confuse the machine so it doesn't know where the startup volume is. Try re-starting by holding down the Option key, if the machine sees start up disks it will highlight them, then choose the internal HD. Once the machine has started then go to System Preferences-Startup Disk and select the internal disk.
If that doesn't work please post back and let us know what happened. BTW you don't state where you are located but you may be covered by AppleCare. Look in your owners manual for the phone number in your area and contact Apple, you have 90 days of free telephone support.
Roger

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