Will a Genius look at my computer?

Question

My iMac stopped working, it turned on but didn't load the hdd. My roommate was on the computer when it happened so I don't know what was done to it. I took it to Apple and the guy I saw plugged in an external and booted the computer from that, the computer booted up exactly as it should. He then opened Disk Utility and started wiping my drive, so I think he assumed it was corrupted data. I took it home and restored from Time Machine and it worked for a couple days and died again, so I did what he did; I put in a SL disc and booted from that and wiped and restored, but it died after a couple days again. I did this a couple more times, then it stopped working altogether; So I decided to take a look at the hardware. FYI I'm an Electronics Engineering major, I've been building computers since 2003 for profit and I'm certified to build circuit boards and program microchips.
Before I opened it up, I ran some test. I know from the Genius at Apple that it will work perfectly fine booting through usb on a working HDD with Mac OS, and it runs fine from the SL disc. I also did a verify disc in the Disk Utility on the SL disc, and I get red writing, errors and such saying the drive wont work. So I'm thinking, and hoping a little, that it's a dying HDD; I open it up and it looks okay, I mean there are no obvious burn marks or anything like that. I take out the HDD and plug it into my laptop via usb and boot my laptop from that drive and run Disk Utility; It boots up perfectly fine, where as it didn't boot up at all on the Desktop comp, and Verify Disk tells me the drive is perfect. All my data is intact. I run some other tests and determine the HDD is not failing. I don't have the equipment I need to test all the parts at my house though, so I'd still need to take it in.
Now to my question, I was talking to someone about this and they said "I guess we'll never know, if there is any sign you opened it they probably wont touch it even for money." this statement doesn't make any sense to me, why would they care if I don't have insurance. I can't think of a reason why they'd have a policy to only work on computers that have been untouched by people who don't work for Apple. I can understand it for if you have insurance, because most people don't know how to handle computers and could break something and Apple doesn't want to be financially responsible for ignorance. But I do know how to handle them and can prove it, and I'm financially responsible for it whether it's my fault or a factory defect because it's not insured. So what business is it of theirs if someone say upgrades their HDD? Or in my case, tests it to see if its working alright, so that when I do take it in I can tell them I've already crossed it off so it saves them some time.

Answer 1

I don't understand it, I ran every diagnostic I could think of on that drive and it all indicated that it was working perfectly, and it was working perfectly. All day yesterday it ran like normal, I installed Lion today and it ran, to my surprise, quite smooth, possibly better then it did on SL, but then again I wasn't doing much on it. Then my roommate gets on it to upload a picture while I'm making buttered toast for lunch and I come back, he's done and gone, the install I had going was finished and I clicked done on it, then it lagged for 5 minutes, and every time I tried to access any content it lagged another 5 minutes. That's how it acts when the HDD is disconnected, the content stays up because it's already been loaded into the computer but new content doesn't come up. I turned it off and then it was just dead, white screen flashing folder with the "?" on it. I tried holding option to boot from my SL disc or my external but nothing would come up, blank screen. I couldn't even get it to eject the disc at first, I ended up rebooting and holding eject for 5 minutes to finally get it.
So I pull it out and plug it into my laptop and the partition I made (50gb) is still intact but the main drive is dead, greyed out not mounting and appearing as empty. Then it started crashing, the HDD itself, it shuts down randomly then starts up again. The problem is it's not on long enough to do anything, I ran a verify disk and it gave a red message saying to repair the drive immediately; But I can't repair or wipe the drive or anything because of the crashing, it's not on long enough. It's just a heap now, I guess I need a new HDD. This is better then a circuit board problem though, I just hope that the HDD problem wasn't caused by another hardware problem.
I need to test the computer with another HDD to make sure. The only HDD available is my external (that I use for Time Machine) so I'm going to partition that and intall Lion on the partition and pop it in. It's a 78% chance that the HDD just died of old age at this point, 3% chance it died from malicious code.