My MacBook Died ...

My MacBook Died ...

Late last night, after working - and distracting myself on the internetz - on the computer for hours, my MacBook started making strange noises. It sounded like a flurry of clicking with occasional beeping noises. I ran the wonderful program OnyX, which repairs permissions and runs various maintenance scripts, but the computer was now acting sluggish as well as making scary noises.

So I decided to hook up my external hard drive - it had been two weeks since I had done so - and back it up, pending an unlikely crash. I had been in the midst of working on two final essays for two final classes, so I emailed my drafts to my parents in the event that a worst-case scenario ever transpired. And it did.

Initially, the excellent back-up program SuperDuper! ran normally. But after a couple of minutes, I started getting the spinning beach-ball-of-death on all of my applications. I could actually move application windows, but I couldn't issue any commands with them, nor could I access my dock and desktop. SuperDuper! was now perpetually stuck at the half-way point in its copying phase and the fan whirred loudly. After fifteen minutes of this nonsense, I decided to force shut down my computer, even though it's basically the worst thing you can do if you're in the middle of backing up a system.

I restarted the computer and saw a gray screen with an apple logo for about five minutes. There was no noise - just total silence. I noticed that my external hard drive was on, so I flipped the power switch off and immediately - I think that this was merely a coincidence - a circle with a diagonal line cutting through it instead of the apple logo appeared. Then, a flashing folder with a question mark inside of it popped up. I restarted the computer. The same thing happened.

So here I am, about to head off to the Apple store in Emeryville to hopefully get this fixed. I only had three hours of sleep last night because I was so worried about this; plus, I had to sign up for community college classes at seven in the morning. Not only did the hard drive failure - I'm quite sure that this is what happened - probably erase everything on my computer, but it probably ruined everything on the external hard drive since it was in the middle of copying when it froze. Fortunately, my roommate, who has had to turn in his MacBook eight times for repairs, gave me directions and advice on what to do at the Apple store. Hopefully, everything will go well. I'll provide an update when I get back from the store later.

An Update ...

After a forty-five-minute bus trip, I finally reached the Apple store in Emoryville. The employee who was helping me said that the hard drive was making bad clicking noises in their tests, which probably means that the reading-and-writing heads were scratching the disk itself. Naturally, my data is ruined and my external hard drive wouldn't launch on any of the computers at the store.

On the upside, Apple contacted me less than two hours later and told me that they had replaced the hard drive. I could pick it up tonight or tomorrow. That was a remarkable turnaround time.

But this really sucks. All of my data from July of last year on is gone, unless I find a way to extract data from my EHD. (Now is the time for me to shamelessly ask anybody for advice/programs that would help). But most of all, I'll miss my pictures - I took five-hundred in the last eight months and they are irreplaceable. Needless to say, I am in a state of mourning.