A weekend filled with staring at the rain outside, well,... that and reinstalling my beloved powerbook.
When I got to work on friday my powerbook (G4) had given up all signs of life. Pushing the powerbutton resulted in the frightening noise of a plane that is crashing and very fast on its way down to the ground. A familiar noise unfortunately that it had been making a while ago already so I knew immediately that there was something seriously wrong. Nothing but an apple desktop with that questionmarked folder telling me that a system disk can not be found, so around 9 a.m. I was already on my way from work to home to see if I could perform any black-voodoo-magic on my powerbook to revive that harddisk.
Luckily I had learned from an earlier hdd-failure that my Apple could be booted from an external drive as long as that drive had OSX on it installed. One of the reasons why I like this system. Booting from an external harddrive was not a problem; accessing the internal 80 gigs of information however seemed to be 'not working'; always the noise of the disk trying to spin up but not being able to do so.
The sollution was simple, this baby needed a new hdd if it had to work ever again without having to use an external drive. I called the friendly people at Macline over in City 2 and told them of my problems. Luck was on my side, again, today and they told me I could have my beloved computer back in a couple of hours if I dropped it off there; they only had one more hdd in stock so I rushed over to bring them the patient that needed urgent treatment.
Waiting was awful. I had lunch with my wife, who came in to town when she heared I would be there, and walked around Mediamarkt, Waterstones and other big shops while constantly looking at my phone to see if I did not, per accident, miss any calls from the store to say that I could go and pick up a revived apple. It took them several hours to replace the hdd and try and salvage some information from the hard drive. Unfortunately the latter did not work and the harddrive had officially become no more than a paperweight.
Since the earlier crash in 2006, which had cost me several months of work that were lost, I had fortunately learned to schedule very regular backups of my information. My userdirectory, with all libraries and preferences was saved on a weekly base and often, when I'd be at work, I would run the backup software 'just to be sure'. My last backup dated from right before I left work on thursday evening... a true blessing that was as I may have lost about 3 or 4 mails since then and no documents at all. The only problem is that everything needs to be reinstalled in order to be able to work again. So this is my weekend, while staring at the rain outside, I wait and install and wait some more and restore information, data and applications...
Thank God for backups but a pox on him for hdd crashes.
When I got to work on friday my powerbook (G4) had given up all signs of life. Pushing the powerbutton resulted in the frightening noise of a plane that is crashing and very fast on its way down to the ground. A familiar noise unfortunately that it had been making a while ago already so I knew immediately that there was something seriously wrong. Nothing but an apple desktop with that questionmarked folder telling me that a system disk can not be found, so around 9 a.m. I was already on my way from work to home to see if I could perform any black-voodoo-magic on my powerbook to revive that harddisk.
Luckily I had learned from an earlier hdd-failure that my Apple could be booted from an external drive as long as that drive had OSX on it installed. One of the reasons why I like this system. Booting from an external harddrive was not a problem; accessing the internal 80 gigs of information however seemed to be 'not working'; always the noise of the disk trying to spin up but not being able to do so.
The sollution was simple, this baby needed a new hdd if it had to work ever again without having to use an external drive. I called the friendly people at Macline over in City 2 and told them of my problems. Luck was on my side, again, today and they told me I could have my beloved computer back in a couple of hours if I dropped it off there; they only had one more hdd in stock so I rushed over to bring them the patient that needed urgent treatment.
Waiting was awful. I had lunch with my wife, who came in to town when she heared I would be there, and walked around Mediamarkt, Waterstones and other big shops while constantly looking at my phone to see if I did not, per accident, miss any calls from the store to say that I could go and pick up a revived apple. It took them several hours to replace the hdd and try and salvage some information from the hard drive. Unfortunately the latter did not work and the harddrive had officially become no more than a paperweight.
Since the earlier crash in 2006, which had cost me several months of work that were lost, I had fortunately learned to schedule very regular backups of my information. My userdirectory, with all libraries and preferences was saved on a weekly base and often, when I'd be at work, I would run the backup software 'just to be sure'. My last backup dated from right before I left work on thursday evening... a true blessing that was as I may have lost about 3 or 4 mails since then and no documents at all. The only problem is that everything needs to be reinstalled in order to be able to work again. So this is my weekend, while staring at the rain outside, I wait and install and wait some more and restore information, data and applications...
Thank God for backups but a pox on him for hdd crashes.
posted by Klaas at 10:46
