Blog on Charlie’s Server

Looks like my powerbook is dead at least until a service technician can take a look at it. I’ll be sending it in on Monday 2005.02.07, and expect it back around Thursday 2005.02.10. One week without a laptop.

When Mum heard the news, she told me to have my friends tie me to a chair and never bring a computer near me for that whole week — I’d surely be going through widthdrawal. Widthdrawal or not, it’s definitely going to be an interesting week. Work, School, Gentoo, it’s all going to Hell this week.

How did it happen, you ask? I don’t know for certain, but I can postulate. What happened, you ask? Now that I know for certain. I woke up last night to my roommate inquiring about the sound coming from the computer(s). It turns out the sound was coming from my laptop. Too sleepy to care, I turned it off and went back to bed. After taking a look at it in the morning, I found that the hard drive sounded like a deisel truck. Now that’s never good. The sound didn’t get any better, but I was able to boot the system (remarkably) and back up my Address Book database as well as my iCal calendars, which were really the only two things that I didn’t have an up-to-the-minute backup of. My ~/Library (preferences, etc.) folder had been backed up a while back, and my Music had been recently mirrored onto Charlie’s Server (via the FTP service).

Looks like everything is going to be fine on my end, in terms of saving all my information. I got what I needed, and was working on creating a convenient .dmg of my music collection (to avoid filename mangling issues between different filesystems) when the hard drive noise got louder and Mac OS X decided to become irresponsive. At that point I gave up.

So basically, what went on is that, several months after dropping the laptop on its side (hey, I tripped, it wasn’t my fault) where the hard drive is, the unit started rattling, presumedly against the side of the case. Rattling at 5000rpm is loud as all hell against an alluminum chassis. Not only was the rattling loud, but it also caused enough vibrations to make disk access impossible.

I called the UConn Co-Op technology guys (I know them well) and filled them in. They said that they can ship it out Monday, and have it back to me by [hopefully] Thursday. Apple support has been excellent in the past, and I do have a subscription to the AppleCare Protection Plan that isn’t even near expiry, so I should be just fine. Meanwhile I’m stuck using the command-line on my server and friends’ computers. Pray for me and my laptop.