my name is mwd

I had a day of panic today. My iBook’s hard disk seemed to totally die on me this morning. It started making odd noises, and then a minute or so later just went mad. I tried to reboot and it wouldn’t come back up. This is not a good thing. The real panic was data loss. I do backup most important things on a regular basis, but not that regular, so I was looking at losing a few weeks of work. Big panic then.

Thankfully, there’s one thing that Apple have done so incredibly right on their laptops. You can power them up into Target Disk Mode by holding down T as you power it up, and then it just acts like a FireWire disk drive. Thankfully I was able to use this mode to transfer all the data from my laptop to my G3 Tower at home. That was a nerve racking time I can tell you. In all I sucked about 10 gig off the iBook, most of which is redundent (ripped CDs mostly), but I didn’t want to be selective or move stuff about on the ibook, I just transfered the lot. Firewire target mode is very fast too. Anyway, this let me get all teh data off my iBook with out needing to boot it. thank goodness.

At the time I bought a firewire cable from Maplin’s this afternoon for 13 quid, I thought, what a rip off, but my opinion has changed dramatically now :)

Of course, I still have a dodgy iBook now. Not sure what I’m going to do with it. Because I got all the data off it, I wondering if it really was a physical disk error, or a logical error, or what. I’ve no way to check the integrety of the data I pulled off today, but the few files I looked at seemed alright. I suspect I’ll reformat and reinstall and see if that goes anywhere. Otherwise it’s off to Apple for a fixing, which will cost me a bob or two I expect.