The Curious Case of my MacBook

[Sporlo]

I said I'd tell you the story of my MacBook someday, so here it is.

First, look what I wrote way back when, while I was still dealing with my G5:

Jun 26, 2008 17:27:40 GMT Sporlo said:

Yeah, we might get an external drive, but really we don't need one that bad, as like I said before, most of our stuff was on the laptop already.

Hmmm... Guess I was wrong


I was just about to re-tell the story, but then I remembered I had a chat with one of my friends a while back about it. Here's part of it: (it's basically a rant, but w/e)
(I'm blue, my friend is green, and anything black is just my comments now)


and it was so frustrating when my 3.25 year old imac gets totally messed up, then fixes itself (to this day im not positive as to the cause/solution), and then a little bit after our 13 month old macbook suddenly decides it's hard drive is messed up

lol...

that really sucks

and whats more is that we bought a $100 disk to repair the hard drive, which it did, which is awesome, but it tells us that the hard drive has a physical malfunction, and it cant save the repaired data back into the drive. (That $100 disk was Disk Warrior. Look it up for more info)

so then we leave the computer sitting on a table doing nothing for a couple weeks, finally get around to buying an external hard drive to save the repaired data, we run the disk again, cuz i had turned off the computer, but THIS time i CANT repair the disk cuz it cant even LOCATE it, and suddenly the hard drive decides to make loud screeches and clicking noises

im like OMGWTFBBQ! It makes no sense! so then we took the comp into the apple store to have them look at it, they swap hard drives, keep the dead one, and now we have a half new computer

and im pissed cuz years worth of time is wasted

whoa

thats just weird-did you do anything to do computer, like handled it roughly or something?

not in the time period between it not starting up and sending it to apple

i didnt get it cuz if it was due to rough handling, it should have been obvious right away

oh

next time you should back up all your stuff in an external hard drive

only software corruption can build unknowingly over time

i know. and thats what also frustrates me

if only

we

had

one

sooner

fuck

ya... this makes me think i should get one

what'd u have on ur comp anyway?

game stuff, school stuff, interent stuff, random stuff

but it was a lot

oh

i also had a lot of software downloaded. like random apps and games

oh

and ALSO i wanted to try one more test with the hard drive. i already tried removing it and putting it back in, but then i wanted to try freezing it to see if it'd do anything

the theory is that it slightly shrinks the parts, potentially unsticking any stuck parts or something similar (haha credits to Lonestar)

didnt you try that already?
Yeeeaaaahhh.... on the OTHER computer


I think you guys'd appreciate this version of the story much better than what I was going to do. Would've been much longer and over-detailed

And now Matan you can say "I told you so" even though you never actually said "You should get a backup hard drive". I've learned my lesson


And what other people should learn from BOTH of my computers is that if you can determine exactly what caused (and solved, if applicable) a computer problem, consider yourself lucky

[Lonestar]

Your first mistake was spending a hundred dollars on a hard drive utility. I recommend Onyx. It's freeware and does a lot of neat maintenance stuff. (The physical problem was probably failure to verify SMART status, which can also be checked in Disk Utility I think.) And hard drives are definitely the most fragile part of a computer, especially a laptop. If you have warning signs that they're failing, consider yourself lucky. They like to fail out of the blue. Speaking of, I need to get an external drive. My dad got one from Western Digital but it can't be partitioned for some reason, so I can't get an HFS+ partition to back up with Time Machine. I will attempt to learn from your mistake and pick up a nice drive at our apple store sometime in the coming days.

[Sporlo]

Yeah I think I remember seeing people mention OnyX in the numerous discussions I searched, and I probably would have tried it if it had some hardware. It was impossible to install software on it as it was in a coma. Disk Warrior has a physical disk, and at least we can use it in the future too. I also did try to use Disk Utility to repair the problem but it wasn't able to do it. Btw the issue it identified was an "invalid node structure". And furthermore, like I said, DW was able to repair the disk. Whatever it did I was able to view all the files and folders, just not open files. Only problem was that the existing drive was clearly physically malfunctioning and we needed something new.

It just amazes me that after sitting in the corner of the room doing nothing it can go from being readable and repairable to being what sounded like destroyed on the inside. Only good news is that our replacement drive was free and done in-store.

And yes mine quite literally failed with no warning whatsoever, at only 13 months old. One morning I turned it on, and it never finished starting up and that was the end of it. Got the blue screeen of death except without words and there was an apple in the center
Too bad it didn't revive itself like the desktop