So last week my harddrive suddenly crashed. Ironically, just as I was going to do a backup before upgrading to OS X 10.3.9. Of course, this was a major showstopper, but as it turned out the process of getting my precious fixed wasn’t that bad.
To my own surprise it turned out, that it was still under warranty (which means i’ve been a switcher for less than a year) which money-wise was nice, but probably meant that it had to be examined, a new piece of hardware had to be ordered — and I could sit on my hands waiting. I bought the Powerbook from Officeline which I later learned had a pretty strange way of handling faulty hardware, so basically I expected the worst. I had pretty decent backups across two external firewire drives made with the wonderful SuperDuper, so data loss wasn’t my biggest concern; I just wanted to get up and running again as soon as possible — and felt sorry for myself as a crash a week later would’ve meant the easiest Tiger upgrade imaginable.
But, to the good stuff: At the store I was told an examination of my machinery could take up to three weeks, but that I could pay a “look at it — now!” fee of DKR 800,-. I would have loved an iPod Shuffle instead, but with potential loss of productivity in mind, I paid up. Still, “right now” meant the next day — and another day for transportation back from the repair shop, not counting the possible wait for a new harddrive. But as I had a borrowed car, I suggested taking the Powerbook to the repair shop 30km away the same day. They agreed, and upon arrival I was offered to hang around Allerød to wait and see if they could find out what’s wrong. That way, I ended up finishing Helle Helle’s Rødby-Puttgarden on a bench in the sun, sitting under a huge banner advertising the play Forstad with my belly full of bad hotdogs. Oh, the irony. An hour and a half later, the repair guy came to the same conclusion as I had; the harddrive needed replacing — Apple could have a new one at the scene about three days later. Not good enough. So I bought a new (100GB) from them, had them put it in for free (warranty repair) and made arrangements to pick up the replacement 80GB at the Copenhagen store the following week.
All in all, it ended up costing me some dough and some time and some driving. And without a car and the comfort of a borrowed Mac Mini where I could’ve booted from my backup had they kept my machine, the story — though I paid the “gogogo”-fee — would have ended with at least 5 working days woithout a laptop. But luckily I ended up up and running within 24 hours of the crash, lost very little data (insert bad backup joke here), and felt very well treated by the Officeline crew who stretched quite a bit to solve my problem.
So in conclusion: If you experience harddisk failure, make sure you have some spare cash, friends abroad who leave you their Mac Mini, a friend in the hospital with a broken leg so you get to keep their car, bootable firewire backups and a bit of patience. As a reward you’ll get your laptop back pretty damn quick, a spare 2.5″ harddrive you can use when you upgrade to Tiger (which you might as well do sooner rather than later before you fiddle with all of your prefs anyway) — in my case I even had the pleasure of being reckognized as a blogger by the guy in the shop because of the name on my invoice.