My Macbook Died
06.24.07 - 10:01am
This is just great, perfect timing. This morning I woke up at 7am and sat down to write a little squib on here as I had neglected this place I had pursued other exploits within the real world. After about 30 minutes of writing about Google and their influence on personal security I decided I was hungry, so I stumbled upstairs, grabbed a bagel and cream cheese and plopped down on the couch. After watching the last half of Starship Troopers and the first half of Matrix Revolutions(I think? The 2nd of the trilogy) I decided I should finish up that blog post of mine. With a mind fresh and ready to pound out the last of that article and get started on another I crashed into my desk with much enthuasiam, ran my finger across the touchpad on my Macbook and noticed that Firefox was frozen up. This is a rather common issue, for some reason Firefox on my Mac decides to crash at random every couple of hours no matter what build. So I tried to force quit Firefox but none of my hotkeys were working. Getting frustrated that 1) Firefox had died and 2)I had forgot to save the ~400 words I had just typed into Wordpress I mashed the power button to force the laptop to restart. Then I hear a faint clicking noise as it reboots.. “Oh God” I say to myself, not the click of death. A little icon popped up with a little file folder and the harddrive stopped spinning. Resetting the laptop and holding it to my ear confirmed my fears, the hard drive is dead. Now what really pisses me off is that I completely forgot to renew my Applecare at the begining of June, so this drive died 3 weeks after my Applecare subscription ended. WTFUX, going to the Lennox Apple store on Monday ready to throw this Macbook through one of the pretty skylights. Let this be a lesson to all you people considering to be early adopters, don’t beta test hardware for Apple.
A note, I’ve had harddrives die before, but usually it’s after 3-5 years of heavy file serving, not after 1 year of sitting on my desk doing relatively nothing. Sorry if I have any spelling errors, I have no simple way to check for errors and I’ve got a build in the garage that I need to be tuning.
Awww damnit, just realized I lost my Windows Home Server RC1 ISO with that dead hard drive.. I had planned on doing a review of it this week also. There goes all my CD-Keys *sigh*
Chris, I would recommend you take the hard drive out of your MacBook, put it in an enclosure, and run Spinrite on it. I’ve had a few drives saved by Spinrite and since your warranty is over, you have nothing to loose.
Aw man that sucks. *goes and buys apple care*. It’s kind of ironic you post this now as I am mid-way furiously re-backing up my laptop drive after ~4 months of not.
At least it’s just the drive that’s dead. Nowadays you can get a 120gb 2.5″ sata drive for about 100 bucks or so so you shouldn’t be set back too much.
Same thing happened to me. Its just a hard drive anyway
Thanks for the comments guys, I\’m going to see what Apple says, pray they\’ll let me renew Applecare, and then replace the hard drive. I haven\’t actually yanked the drive yet, I\’m going to pretend I\’m a computer illiterate individual and pray the Apple Genius\’ will fall for my routine. Ideally I\’d like to renew Applecare, have Apple replace the hard drive and go along my merry way. If that fails then I\’ll just yank the drive, email the hdd manufacturer and ask for an RMA. If that fails then it looks like I\’m in the market for a 2.5\” drive. It\’s a good thing I didn\’t have much vital data on there asides from a few CD-Keys.
edit: my website looks like ass in IE6.. never realized it as I only browsed it via Firefox. Guess it\’s time to redesign :)
The second movie in the Matrix trilogy is The Matrix Reloaded. Just by the way ;).
You realllly need to update your WordPress install. The current versions auto-save posts and have saved my ass many times.
Not to mention 2.0.3 has like 80 exploitable bugs.
Hush! Don’t tell everyone I’m still running 2.0.3 ;) Thanks for the information Robin, I was too lazy to open a new IE window to Google the Matrix Trilogy *sigh* I’m already having the shakes and chills from not having my Mac operational. I guess I’ll be doing a ground-up rebuild of this website with the new wordpress + k2 and haxor it to bits, fun fun.
I’ve used Spinrite and sometimes it doesn’t manage to save your ass, so give it a try — I guess you’ve got nothing to lose, huh?
And the second Matrix is Reloaded, Revolutions is the third.
Try using Disk Warrior. Has saved many hard drives for me… and since it’s a Mac program you wont have to pull the drive.