June two years ago and my friend and I bought two 1.5 AL PowerBooks on the same receipt. Lovely machines, albeit somewhat hot to the touch.
Fast forward to three weeks ago and my hard drive starts exhibiting signs of a terminal illness; not booting, death rattles, all the normal “you’re about to lose all your data” type stuff.
Gulp.
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Contributed by: Mark Standen
June two years ago and my friend and I bought two 1.5 AL Powerbooks on the same receipt. Lovely machines, albeit somewhat hot to the touch.
Fast forward to three weeks ago and my hard drive starts exhibiting signs of a terminal illness; not booting, death rattles, all the normal “you’re about to lose all your data” type stuff.
Gulp.
Thankfully it was Satuday night so I was able to spend all night opening the Powerbook (horible, horrible task) removing the drive, hooking it up to an external FW and saving the data to my desktop G4.
Curiously, once it was out in the fresh, cool air the drive was a little happier. I used Disk Warrior to repair the drive to the point where it would mount and then Disk Ultility for the rest of the repair. I then saved everything using Carbon Copy Cloner. Thank you to all the developers responsible for this software.
Although my Powerbook was still under extended warranty I needed to to be working by Monday, so Sunday morning I headed down to the computer store for a Samsung 120Gb replacement. Lovely, cool running drive. Monday morning I was indeed up and running.
Here’s the interesting bit. Exactly a week later my friend’s sister machine did exactly the same thing! The little Toshiba 80Gb drive went through exactly the same death spiral. It got hot, rattled when you titlted the computer and then finally wouldn’t boot. Like mine, he was able to recover data when the drive was outside the computer. A warranty check had the drive fail on the second test cycle.
So, fellow PBers, here is the pre-warning, if you have a 1.5 Al Powerbook delivered in June 2004, with the 80Gb 5400 upgrade, for the love of data, backup now!
Contributed by: Mark Standen
