Ok, major disaster, or at least it feels like it right now. My 12″ powerbook laptop died.
I was working on it last night when it froze solid. This doesn’t happen often, but its a computer, computers do that. The problem here is that it never came back up. It will make the mac start up chime, then the CDrom will cycle, then… nothing. I’ve tried all of the things recommended by apple to try to get a powerbook to start up, but none of them are working. The hard drive isn’t making a sound. I’m left with having to probably take the thing into a mac store to get it fixed… which probably means several weeks without my laptop, AND no access to all of my writing, development notes, scripts and other megatokyo and warmth writing material. Yes, all of it is on my laptop, and my last backup of it is at least a month ago.
I can’t catch any fucking breaks. I really can’t. Everytime i turn around its something else gone boffo. (sigh)
I have to get working on monday’s comic - i can’t let this impact the schedule. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to deal with the problem. I just hope its not a super serious one.
Did i mention how much this sucks?
- pirotunes: John Russell — bp70/32 — lowercase - sound2002 (2002) -
O_O
Fred’s Powerbook Died?
That’s Scary.
I don’t want my Powerbook to die too.
Anyways… Fred, it’s Murphy’s Law. If something can go wrong, it will… and it has. Good luck to ya, and hope that your hdd didn’t have a serious… crash.
I’m surprised that the Apple support page you mentioned didn’t suggest trying to boot from an Install CD and (if that works) running the disk utility from there. At least it’d tell you if it was just the hard disc that was the problem.
Best of luck and all that. I know it’s no fun at all.
Just in case you haven’t seen it already, this page (docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464) is probably a bit more pertinent to your problem since it sounds like it deals with your specific issue. That Knowledge Base page is more or less the Apple Bible when it comes to startup problems.
If you haven’t done it yet, you might want to try rebooting using the System Disc (by holding down C on startup while the disc is inserted) and going up to the menus at the top, selecting Disk Utility, and then attempting to Verify or Repair your hard drive. If you Verify Disk and get an error, try to Repair Disk. If it reports that it can’t repair it, run it two more times (Apple’s tech people would tell you the same thing, since it can take up to three runs to fix some problems). If it still isn’t repaired after running it three times…then yeah, take it to Apple.
Oh, and Apple’s turnaround on repairs for me has always been great. The longest I’ve ever had to wait was about 5 days (not business days…regular days). Usually it’s more like 3-4.
Hope you get it all sorted out.
–Anubis IV
l i n u x
actually, i had linux (FC3) rather destroy my boot/games hard drive once. it wasnt a fun experience. im just glad that it didnt do anything to my slave drive with all my animes and music on it. i would have cried.
Ouch…and here we thought that Windows machines had a monopoly on random fatal crashes. Anyway, I just hope that the techs at the Apple Store are able to get you beack up with a minimum of data loss. However, a bit of good advice for cases where you have a ‘Mission Critical’ type of often changed data is to back-up on a weekly, or if necessary, daily basis. I know that has saved me in the past when I’ve had my share of fatal computer errors on both Windows AND Linux PC’s. I hope it doesn’t cost you too much for the repairs and data restoration though…if the HDD is really fried it could cost upwards of 1000 USD to restore the data contained on it based on the drive size >_< ($1200 for an old 40GB HDD that I NEEDED to restore data from.)
Erm….MacOS is a *nix variant. With commercial support. With a wide base of users and developers. There’s no point switching to nix.
hmmm…speaking of all the projects you have going on….hows “Warmth” going… it sounds like its gonna be amazing. BY NO MEANS IS THE A RUSH TO GET IT UP….i just havnt heard you (fred) talk about it in awhile and itd be kool to see where you are at now with it…..
-Later Days
aah…the old -my hd’s down- muse.
definitely been there.
and, i know it is literally your job, but i personally think you, fred, can take your time.
i may not know your schedule but MT, (and warmth ^_^) has been well worth my life-time devoted to reading this material. thus, *and i hope others agree*, you can take a little break until your machinery has been reincarnated.
there may be the rabid fans that live on MT, and don’t get me wrong, i’m one too, but if they’re a true fan, they’ll be okay with a week-or-two stop. (or SGD fillers, but let’s pretend they never existed :P) in order for you to get everything refreshed and together.
and for my own spurts ofmadness from an anime-infested mind..
“Fred, fight!”
~ochiba
Have you tried hooking it up to another Mac using FireWire Target Disk Mode? (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583)
Good luck Fred, if the drive died I’d be happy to toss a little donation your way, help pay for data recovery. The PA guys just went through this too, sucks a lot. Hope things turn out better than that.
I once was faced with a Mac with Fred’s symptoms. It turned out to be a jammed mouse button. You see, holding down the mouse button says, “Eject any floppies or CDs you might have booted off of, and wait until I release it before you look for anything else.” So his HD might be fine after all. Here’s hoping.
Hey Fred, sorry to hear about your Powerbook problems. I do hope it’s something simple, as has been suggested.
On a lighter note, here are a couple links to a couple pictures from NDK that I took. I thought you might enjoy seeing them!
http://www.thecrucialrealm.net/gallery/ndk_2005_sunday/IMG_4049
http://www.thecrucialrealm.net/gallery/ndk_2005_sunday/IMG_4050
Ok, quick update. Took it to the mac store yesterday, they were very helpful, we tried to bring it up, tried resetting things, tried accessing the drive via fire wire, etc, etc. In the end, it’s looking like something is fried on the MB. Nice thing about apple these days is they have a nice flat fee to fix and refurb these things, so thats what i went ahead with. Also opted to have the data pulled off the drive (which the guy there thinks is fine - none of this looked like a HD failure) so even if they have to wipe the drive in the repair process, all of my data will be fine.
Was real tempted to just buy a new 15″ pb while there. I hate that store.
My iBook recently crashed for the first time, and I discovered that Mac does in fact have a “blue screen of death” (except it’s dark gray and has “Please restart your computer” in four languages :P)
But my iBook is fine, where you seem to have a more serious problem. As mentioned by James, booting from the Install CD would be one of the first things I’d try. My iBook allows me to eject the cd as soon as it’s revved up (it doesn’t wait for MacOS to boot), so it might be worth it to try and pop out whatever’s in there and boot the installation disk.
And if you must have it repaired or recovered, you can always take it out on us with SGD’s
Curse my slow internet!
Ignore my previous post…. >.<
That actually wasn’t a BSoD, its what’s known as a kernel panic, much more serious. Luckily nothing got fried, eh?
god damn, does that suck.
Well, I’m glad that this was only a problem with the systemboard there Fred. Having been on the laptop scene for quite some time and being a laptop tech myself, I’ve seen quite a few instances where things of this nature can blow all to hell. If you don’t have one, probably an external hard drive (besides an Ipod) is a worthwhile investment for laptops, especially if you keep valuable data on it. There’s ones out there that you push a button and it does the backup for you. Not trying to pimp them or anything, but as being a tech, I know a lot of people think their laptop’s HDD is going to live until their golden years. Fact with laptop hdds is that they don’t last these days beyond a couple of years at best, many less than that. It doesn’t matter if they’re in constant use or not either. Backup drives aren’t so bad because they’re an intermediary, until you back up to something more permanent. Something other that would be a solid state storage device. The Ipod Nanos are actually just that. With less moving components, these things are actually better than the Ipod Minis and counterparts. I’m pretty sure these will have a longer lifespan, so something to look into. They are merely an example, and I suspect Solid State hard drives are in the near future for back up purposes. Just a recommendation that may aid you later on.
kick it ’til it sparks.
Unfortunately, the “rapid application of percussive force” technique of repairing computers generally ends up breaking more things than it fixes (or at least it voids the warrantee)…. Trust me, I speak from experience… ^^;;