Hard drive on the fritz
I didn’t use my powerbook much during Saturday, but had several things planned for Sunday. Before we went to bed I set it to stream music to our stereo using iTunes over our Airport Express as I have done many times before. Sunday Susan had to get up early, before she left, however, I noticed that the radio was playing. I thought it was weird, but thought nothing of it. As a passing remark when she left Susan said that the powerbook had made weird noises and had frozen, she had turned it off. Oh shit.
Saturday afternoon I talked to my sister, and learned that she was experiencing disk trouble after Disk Utility told her there were errors on her disk. I told her that unless the hard disk was making noises it would probably be cured by a reformatting. Annoying, but not something that would require great expenses. Now I was in the situation that my hard drive was making noises…
Ever the optimist, I started up the laptop to see what was wrong. It made a tiny noise while starting up, but didn’t cause any problem. For the first 30 minutes or so I didn’t see any problems. Suddenly though, the computer froze up, and the tiny noises weren’t so tiny any more. Not a regular head crash, and the problems seemed to be connected to heat build up, but the hard disk really needs replacing.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to copy all the contents of the drive before it finally gives up. I have an elaborate plan involving our balcony, a metal grille, and the cold weather we’re having. To help me there I’ve ordered a LaCie d2 external hard drive, and a Hitachi 7K100 100GB replacement hard disk. Hopefully, the new drive will be more robust than my old disk, at least it’s the make and model we’re using at work. I’ll post updates when there are any.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Oh – that sucks! Hope you’ll get the backup before it is too late.
/thomas