MaW’s Blog

It has been a sad weekend. My Powerbook’s hard drive is ailing, spawning bad blocks and bits of lost filesystem all over the place. Thankfully I’ve got most of the data from it, but it seems that it’s been doing this for a while and I hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t I noticed? I put the effects of the I/O errors down to various other things which I shouldn’t have. It was only when my iTunes library started getting corrupted and it gave me an error message which indicated the actual problem that I realised what was going on. Booting from the OS X install CD, Disk Utility is unable to repair the filesystem and suggests that I try backing up and reformatting it to isolate the bad blocks.

So I currently have four options:

1. Send it to Apple to have the hard drive replaced, probably costing an obscene amount of money
2. Buy a new hard drive and attempt to replace it myself, probably ending up with a few screws left over (the previous Powerbook models had easy to replace drives, the AlBooks don’t)
3. Reformat and reinstall the drive and hope that it’s capable of keeping the corruption confined to its current extents
4. Buy a new Powerbook

Of course, option 4 doesn’t really leave me a way to sell the current Powerbook, which is otherwise fine. I’m currently trying option 3, because it doesn’t require any money spending on it. Option 2 is quite realistic but very scary. I’m tempted to take this as a sign from on high (or somewhere, possibly from inside my head) that I should buy a new Powerbook, but I’d like to pass on one that’s in reasonable working order if at all possible.

We shall see how things go. The procedure for dismantling the thing is rather involved and involves lots of little screws of different sizes, so I’m not particularly hot on doing it myself. It’s a nervous time here at my desk at the moment.