The irony I did not need.
So I’ve been bad about backups, yeah. I have an old tangerine iBook. I have a 250 meg Zip drive and some disks. I have 14 or 15 gigs of music and writing and graphics work and freelance stuff on it. It’s a relatively new 20 gig drive. I’m cocky and careless. You do the math.
But, cockiness and carlessness aside, it was eating at me. So. I found a lovely LaCie 40 gig external drive. Ordered it. Loaded the driver for OS 9.2. (My tangerine doesn’t quite have enough oomph to run OSX. Sigh.) Plugged in the drive. Watched the arrow go all wonky when I tried to move it about the screen to close windows. Pulled the USB plug to the drive. Restarted.
Whir-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!
Oh, fuck.
I think in a couple of days I’ll find it terribly funny, and we’ll have a jolly laugh at the irony and the folly of it all, ha ha, and the speed with which the potential loss of what in the grand scheme of things is really little more than prettily patterned 1s and 0s has reduced me to a blubbering supplicant desperately bargaining with whatever Powers might possibly be that if everything turns out to be okay or at least salvageable then I’ll mend my ways, I’ll back up religiously every night and say my prayers, I’ll floss, I’ll stop wasting so much time on the internet with egosurfing and troll-baiting and “research” and googling for unmentionables and—
And—
It will be funny. Someday. Right?
Right? Ha ha? Someday?
But. This moment here. Right now, as I’m typing on the Windows box at work and staring at the blank black screen of the tangerine iBook I’ve used as an outboard brain since 1999. That I write on. That I design on. That I read the news on. That I keep track of friends with. That holds all of my prettily patterened 1s and 0s.
Right now, not so much.
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Hey, it's not dead yet. Do try booting the iBook from a CD with an OS on it. It may be something as simple as being confused about where to book from. It might just mean that you need to apply a little TLC to some of the invisible directory files--that clicking is sometimes just odd seek behavior, not a dead drive. And even if the drive is dead, just pop it into a new case, and there's your data.
Don't despair--and don't reformat or instal a new os until after you've gotten your data off. At least some of the data is retrievable, if not all of it.
I'm currently waiting on pins and needles for the best Mac guy in town—Patrick Lawrence at Power Mac Pac—to take a look and tell me what's what. So.
Geek hat on -- it's almost always possible to recover data and/or the hard drive.
Corrolary -- it's always incredibly tense waiting to find out whether or not you can recover the data.
Good luck.
Sorry Kip. I really tried. I/O board swap, Freezer trick, shake-a-shake-a, it no worky. Mechanical head failures suck!! I hope you enjoy the new PB. Let me know if you do send the dead HD to DriveSavers, and what the result is. I'll make sure Tangerine finds a good home. -Patrick
I would skip over DriveSavers and proceed directly to John Edward:
http://www.johnedward.net/
I was there last week myself when my 6 months old NEW ibook died with my THESIS on it.
Nobody was laughing. I think I shed a small tear. Ok, I bawled like a baby. But at least I have warranty.
And no backup. (ouch)
And here I am, a techy-geek-no-it-all. I was spanked. Spanked hard.
Google brings me here to weep with you.
hard+drive+iBook+dead
"I'll make those back-ups tomorrow"...
Poor little guy won't stop clicking... mommy, why won't he stop clicking...
Just make it stop.