It's The End Of My Hard Drive As I Know It and I Feel Fine or Why I'm Running Tiger on Sno
Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.
So, I had some disturbing news this weekend, my MacBook Pro, Zen, had his hard drive die on me and unlike most folks who have had a drive crash, I'm not panicked, once I figure out how I am going to work over the next few days until Apple can replace the drive I've been doing what I need to get an old machine up and running.
What Happened
So I was doing general decrufting to prepare for the snow leopard upgrade things started feeling wanky. Emptying caches took longer then it should've. Repairing permissions and scanning the disk were throwing errors. I dropped out to single user mode and ran fsck on the drive. Then it happened the drive start throwing I/O errors and I knew it was on it's last legs. I couldn't get the machine to boot after that. Like his namesake I think I heard Zen say "I have failed you. I am sorry. I ...", and yes it was the first time I heard Zen refer to itself as I.
Initially I was panicked, then I thought for a minute. I had just done a full system backup to prepare for the upgrade. All my critical data is stored on dropbox so I didn't need to worry about losing data. The IT gods were looking out for me, I have all my data, the AppleCare on that machine expires Next month, so the repair would is free now but would cost me money by the end of next month. To quote a baseball legend, "today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth".
The Pleasure In Dealing With The Apple Store
This is third time since I bought this machine that I've had to go to the apple store for a repair. The first involved the keyboard (probably caused by me eating one too many lunches over the keybaord) the second was the power supply shorting out. In ever case dealing with them has been a pleasure.
The one thing that surprises me geniuses is that they always seem to trust my technical skills, unlike other technical support folks. For example when I got to the apple store without an appointment last night their first reaction was that I'd need to make an appointment, however once I explained the triage I had done, they were aware that all I'd need to do is drop off the machine since I had already done as much as the genius would do before tagging it for a repair.
The other thing that surprises me was how willing the geniuses are to take your word. A genius called this morning to confirm that it will take a couple of days to do the repair and he talked about what happened. After I explained that I was prepping for the Snow Leopard upgrade the genius said they'd install Snow Leopard and iLife '09 on the machine. He didn't ask for proof I bought Snow Leopard or iLife '09 he just told me that they would install it since I said my plan was to do the install. This really impressed me, I expected that the machine would come back to me in its original state (tiger, iLife original, etc) instead of with the software I said I'm running on it. It might be that geniuses are trained to be very careful with folks who's machines are being reparied, it might be the classic pre-mac Apple ][ plate on outside of the MBP. Either way it was refreshing.
How Will I Survive Until The Laptop Is Fixed
Like I said before, I'm lucky. A while back I gave a friend of mine, Helen, my old MacBook when I upgraded to the Pro (I upgraded because the machine was a little underpowered for my needs) as part of a plan to get her to join the dark side and become a switcher. Something that worked she loves the computer and it has become her person non-work machine. WHen I told her about my predicament she gladly loaned me the old MacBook so I could work for a few days until I can get Zen back in his Snow Leopard form. The interested thing is that this Mac is still running Tiger so little things are driving me crazy (no spaces, a couple of 10.5 apps that I miss, etc) But at the end of the day I'm grateful that this went down the way it did.