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My PowerBook's drive fried... installing OS X now :)

Well, I'm installing OS X (Tiger) for the first time today. My (work) PowerBook's hard drive nuked itself last week and fried all of my data (thankfully I had backed up a few weeks ago, and often saved more important files to my external drive) but I did still lose a good bit of stuff. I've never had a hard drive die so hard before... absolutely no warning, and completely dead. The system just froze one day while I was opening a power point file, and upon restarting, wouldn't get past the grey screen with the Apple logo. The PowerBook belongs to my work, and no longer under warranty (heh they didn't buy the warranty at all) so I had to fend for myself on it (called Apple and almost got hung up on the minute they realized I was out of the warranty period lol). I used a boot disk to try Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, and TechTool on the drive, but nothing worked, and all the files were lost (on the bright side, I convinced my work the value of buying all that nifty software haha). The previous owner of the PowerBook lost the installation disks too, so I had to go buy a new copy of OS X.

Anyhow, so I'm installing OS X now. It took me over an hour to swap out the drive (I ordered a 100GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 ST9100823A... I picked it since it got good reviews and it's also the same drive in my brother's PowerBook, so I knew it would be compatible)... I wish Apple would wise up a bit on the self-repair parts... my IBM ThinkPad's hard drive can be swapped out in under 1 minute. With the PowerBook you have to essentially take apart the entire laptop.

Well, the install's almost done -- wish me luck :)

Peace.

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Success :)

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Congratz too u! U sure the peeps in the office just didn't hide all ur desktop icons and then change ur screensaver to the grey screen with the apple logo! Ur hard drive could have been working fine lol!

_ngx

I"ve never had the chance to disassmble a mac, I doubt it would be fun though.

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Back in the states.

nographics, I'm an IT professional and I use both Windows and Mac extensively - believe me, I know what I'm doing. And besides that, most of the people at my work's computer knowledge ends at typing email and word documents, so no chance it was a prank (not to mention it cost them a lot of money).

DryFire - indeed it wasn't much fun. I mean yeah, interesting to see the guts of a PowerBook haha, but really, Apple should make it easier if they ever want businesses to adopt their systems over competitors like IBM (why pay your IT staff to spend 1+ hours swapping an Apple hard drive, when you can pay them to spend 1 minute swapping an IBM hard drive, and have their employee back to work?). Interestingly, the installation instructions for OS X did not mention anything at all about installing the OS on a new unformatted drive (mostly info on upgrading from past versions)... guess they really don't want you swapping out your own hard drive haha. Well, as I mentioned, there's no warranty on this system so I didn't have a choice. Fortunately I know how to do it, so I didn't have to pay an overpriced fee to have a computer shop install it for me.

I hope Apple takes some "more" tips from IBM on the upcoming Intel-based PowerBook (i.e. Apple recently borrowed the ThinkPad's Active Hard Drive Protection feature for the most recent PowerBook model).

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

My dad has been buying IBM laptops for work for a few years now (by my suggestion). Parts sometimes do die but you're right it is incredibly easy to replace parts.

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Back in the states.

Originally posted by AbsoluteCross:

nographics, I'm an IT professional and I use both Windows and Mac extensively - believe me, I know what I'm doing. And besides that, most of the people at my work's computer knowledge ends at typing email and word documents, so no chance it was a prank (not to mention it cost them a lot of money).

DryFire - indeed it wasn't much fun. I mean yeah, interesting to see the guts of a PowerBook haha, but really, Apple should make it easier if they ever want businesses to adopt their systems over competitors like IBM (why pay your IT staff to spend 1+ hours swapping an Apple hard drive, when you can pay them to spend 1 minute swapping an IBM hard drive, and have their employee back to work?). Interestingly, the installation instructions for OS X did not mention anything at all about installing the OS on a new unformatted drive (mostly info on upgrading from past versions)... guess they really don't want you swapping out your own hard drive haha. Well, as I mentioned, there's no warranty on this system so I didn't have a choice. Fortunately I know how to do it, so I didn't have to pay an overpriced fee to have a computer shop install it for me.

I hope Apple takes some "more" tips from IBM on the upcoming Intel-based PowerBook (i.e. Apple recently borrowed the ThinkPad's Active Hard Drive Protection feature for the most recent PowerBook model).

I was having an attempt at sarcasism looks like I failed sorry if I irritated u. My bad!

_ngx

haha no not irritated... was just clarifying

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Originally posted by AbsoluteCross:

The system just froze one day while I was opening a power point file.

Power point... Hmm, well thats your answer, Microsoft's Software Kills.

It must've sucked... the same thing happened to my aunt's Powerbook (work). Coincidence...?

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