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Giving thanks to the man upstairs
I learned yesterday that our upstairs neighbor is an Apple-certified technician. This comes in very handy when the hard drive on one's beloved PowerBook suffers an acute failure and the machine won't boot.
My computer, my precious gem, may be screwed. It turns out that your internal hard drive should never be more than 80% full for the machine to be happy. And it certainly shouldn't always be 99% full, like mine is. Damn digital photos.
It also turns out that BACKING UP IS A GOOD THING. My most recent backups are over a year old. I know better.
The drive is so full that even the disk-repair utilities can't deal with it. The data is there, we've seen it; we just have to figure out how to get it off safely. "The data" being all of my photos and 13 years worth of email. Among other things.
Steve spent three hours with me last night booting in open-firmware mode and trying to get my machine to act like an external drive and zapping PRAM and using terminal mode to see the data unix-style. We're not in the clear yet, but I believe that everything will be OK. Repeat after me: Everything will be OK.
November 22, 2006 12:19 PM
Oh no! Good luck. Everything will be ok.
Everything will be okay!
OMG - seriously sad! I'm sending good juju your way. I am having computer probs too - in teh form of spyware popups i think. i'm bringing it in to a computer savvy friend next week. :(
You reboot with the 'T' key pressed to have it act as a Firewire drive. Then connect it to another computer via Firewire, and delete files.
Mercy, me! I've been there, done that, torched the T-shirt. Having the hard drive fail is akin to seeing your life flush down the drain. I hope you can recover all that needs to be recovered, Ariel. You have my deepest sympathy. Really.
does your upstairs neighbor have those discs hanging as decor in his apaartment?