The hard drives in both of my laptop computers (the PC first, then the Mac) have recently begun acting up, making noises, and causing corresponding slowdowns, stalls, and suchlike problems during normal use. The PC hard drive took a couple days work to get so it hasn’t given me trouble since – just a few bad sectors, apparently. The hard drive in my iBook on the other hand … I tried repairing it, it took just about as long as the PC side – would have taken less, but I forgot to use the right tool for the job – and … well, it helped some, but the drive kept giving negative symptoms… Strangely, one of the symptoms was a sort of quacking sound.
Anyway, it was causing enough problems -and the work I do on the machine is important enough to me- that I finally decided a couple of weeks ago to buy a replacement drive. Shopped a bit, around town and online, and bought a drive today. Spent the last seven hours (so far) backing things up, making a last minute run to Home Depot for a tool I thought was in the house but apparently migrated to Pine, taking the thing apart, putting it back together (you basically have to disassemble 65% of the laptop to get at the hard drive), fiddling with almost a dozen different sizes of very tiny screws, taking it partially apart again because something didn’t fit, putting it back together again, installing a clean copy of Tiger on the drive (did I mention I’d wanted to put this off until Leopard came out, since I like to do clean installs of new OS’s? It couldn’t wait), moving my files back over from the backup… re-downloading most of my apps (I figured clean copies would work better).. trying to find a few that are apparently abandonware and uncached anywhere… Whew.
Well, it seems mostly to have gone well. My uhh… my battery doesn’t seem to fit right any more, which is weird, but it seems to be … well, stuck IN, so … it’s okay? I’m torrenting a new copy of Photoshop (on account of I don’t have thousands of dollars to buy it), but maybe I’ll try Acorn as well… Ooh, that reminds me, I need to find my iWork and iLife discs and re-install them. (Or buy the new versions? Ugh, more money.) Oh well, back to work…
