Reality Bytes

I never knew the day would come when I would feel the irrepresible urge to cause harm to my powerbook. I experienced Murphy’s law first hand - “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”

Scenario: I have a project due in 1 hour. I’m workin furiously on my laptop in the computer labs. All of a sudden, the system hangs!! Yes..I said it…a Mac hangs!! I was too shocked to react. And to add insult to injury, a cocky Windows fan in the lab starts ranting about Macs being overhyped.

Well..I shut down the powerbook (had to unplug the battery). Tried turning it on…but the powerbook refuses to boot. My project is due in half an hour…and the freakin laptop is dead! I literally wanted to throw the laptop out of the window. Whats worse, the only copy of the project is in the laptop. The hard disk keeps making this grinding noise. I knew that it was dying slowly but surely. I hook up my laptop to a PowerMac G5 with a firewire cable and run a scandisk on the powerbook (through target mode) . The Powermac finds a lot of errors on the disk, but it cant correct them! I lose all hope. Out of desperation, I try booting the powerbook again…and it boots..as if there was’nt any problem! So everything goes well and the project is submitted on time. Phew.

I knew for sure that the hard disk is dying. I did not have any apple care. So I decided to replace the hard disk myself. Brave huh? So I opened the powerbook and replaced the hard drive with a spanking new 80GB drive.

Moral of the story: backup backup backup….no matter what system you have.