Of hard drives, burning bushes, and lasers

The other day I got home from work and my wife mentioned something about our iBook running slow all day. I asked her if she had rebooted lately thinking that maybe that universal cure would speed it up.

Yeah, well, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

It turns out that upon reboot the iBook wouldn’t, err, boot. We just got the gray Apple screen with the progress circle taunting us. Debugging a screwball computer isn’t my favorite thing in the world to do when I get home but I figured I would suck it up and see what was wrong.

Again, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

After booting from a Tiger DVD I opened Disk Utility and was presented with this:

It was around this point that I knew I was in trouble. I wasn’t yet sure how much trouble but you can tell those situations that aren’t going to turn out that well. Kind of like that time in college when one of my roommates discovered a cache of fireworks that were probably eight years old. (Disclaimer: To you kids out there, don’t try this at home. We were largely untrained professionals. No one was hurt, unless we count that bush in the front yard that caught fire.)

Booting into target disk mode wasn’t showing the drive and upon review of my latest backup I realized I was about 5-6 weeks behind. At this point I was running out of options so I did what any self respected person desperate for the drive to work would do.

I put the iBook in the freezer for a half hour. (Disclaimer #2: This time I was a moderately more trained professional, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless it was under extreme circumstances.)

Thanks to some time sitting on frozen Eggos and chicken nuggets I was able to get it to boot into target disk mode. Some very quick firewire work later I had all my latest data and I could officially scrap the drive in the machine for a new one.

One more time, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

Here is a small picture showing the major interior parts of my iBook:

Apparently in order to replace the hard drive nearly all of those parts need to be taken out. Somehow I don’t think out in Cupertino the same groups work on the Mac Pro as the iBook. One has hard drives that aren’t mounted with screws the other has a hard drive that is mounted with EVERY screw.

Thankfully I’m at the point in life where having a good job pays off since I can then pay someone else to bust out the tiny screwdrivers for iBook open heart surgery. The only problem now is I got to keep the dead drive and I find myself seriously tempted to run it through the industrial metal cutting laser at my Dad’s company. That desire for destruction seems familiar, like a time in college when we found some old fireworks…