Macbook is back

Earlier this week, while browsing the net I clicked on another app and suddenly received the spinning beachball of death. And death it was. The drive simply took a dump on me and refused to be accessed any longer.

I went to my iMac G5 and downloaded the latest Tech Tools Deluxe and ran it and it confirmed my fears. So, as a last-ditch effort I attempted to wipe the drive and restore my OS and data from my SuperDuper image. Letting that run over night resulted in a failure.

I limped along for the remainder of the week booting from my SuperDuper image and made my Genius Bar appt last night for today at 10:30. I wasn’t in a great hurry due to my last experience — about 8 months ago I had an almost identical experience and it took the local Apple store 5 days to resolve.

Today’s experience was pleasantly different. After telling my story of what had happened and the actions I performed, the Apple Tech simply stated, “sounds like a failed hard drive.” He quickly checked and found that they had one on-hand and swapped it out on the spot. He asked me if I wanted to check it in to have the OS installed and drive throughly tested? or to simply install it a let me take it home to install the OS myself. Of course, you know what I opted for!

The only drawback though was… the drive, the “technically” a 160GB hard drive, is geometrically different from the one replaced and subsequently smaller in size. This caused me a little grief where I had to move some of the data from my SuperDuper image over to another hard drive before I could actually restore my image — otherwise, I would have run out of space.

A bummer to lose that additional disk space, but I’ll deal with it. The Macbook is back up and running and I only lost minimal data — the time since my last SuperDuper image. In that was some photos and a new audio book and CD from iTunes. Luckily, I was able to copy back to the library the purchased content — a very nice feature of iTunes. The photos that were lost were from an event at work and a few bike pics. Nothing that I’m really upset about. But thank goodness for a tool like Super Duper!