Powerbook HD crash

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 ¸dby-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.

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