« Andy's Blog Now Powered by Moveable Type (Or, Why You Need to Update Your RSS Feed, Folks...) | Main | The Doc That Roared »
January 18, 2004
Hard Drive Nightmares
With Susanne heading out of town this weekend, I decided to spend the weekend installing OS X Panther on my Mac. The installation itself was pretty straightforward, but then everything started going buggy on me - Netscape would crash, Explorer would crash, iTunes would crash -- even the text editor would crash. To make matters worse, whenever I'd try to search for a file, the system would hang for five minutes and my hard drive would make a series of plaintive wails -- not good, I thought.
Taking advantage of the 90 days of free tech support from Apple earned by my purchase of Panther, I gave them a call and described my plight. The tech support person told me that my hard drive might need to be re-initialized -- erased clean, tabula rasa. So rather than visiting the farmer's market this morning -- a strict religious ritual for me every Sunday -- I spent three hours backing up my entire computer onto two 60 gig external hard drives that Susanne and I had purchased for editing our thai boxing documentary. This took longer than it should have - the Finder started to crash, making it difficult for me to keep track of what I'd copied already and what I hadn't.
By lunch time I was ready to re-install Panther. I stuck in the installation disk, kissed my mouse for good luck, and hit the start button. In a few minutes my entire computer - every article, every photo, every website I'd done in the last four years - was wiped clean from the internal hard drive. Hoping that lightning wouldn't strike my backup drives in the meantime, I then tried to re-install Panther, but each time I tried, it didn't work. I called tech support again, and this time they said I was out of luck. "Sounds like a hardware problem. Check your Yellow Pages for a local repair center or visit us at W-W-W...."
Refusing to give up, I went back to square one, pulling out several dusty CD sleeves out of storage to reinstall the operating system that came with my computer four years ago. That worked like a charm; emboldened, I decided to give Panther one more try. Finally, this time it worked.
Forty eight hours after my nightmare started, I got everything working again -- new operating system, old files, all living in harmony. And just in time to watch the Patriots game, no less.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at January 18, 2004 3:27 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
