That’s right, you heard me. Today, to use the words most favored by my College-Now class, “The Macbook’s bust.”
Dead. Came home from a nine hour work day, and the system is frozen, the little spinning umbrella staring insistently at me, as if to say, “Just two more seconds, I promise I’ll start working again soon!” I let it sit for awhile, eventually become frustrated, and then hard reboot (hold the power button for 5 seconds).
First sign of trouble:
“Uh-oh. What’s that sound? Oh crap. No, I know that sound.” *smacks forehead* “No! NO! Come on!”
What was it I was hearing? It was the hard disk drive. Making the same sounds as a floppy disk drive out of the 80′s and 90′s. (I’m dating myself with that comment, but still.) A few loud crackle/scratch/grind sounds followed by the sound of a short, thin piece of metal ‘pinging’ once or twice.
“Well,” I think, “at least the screen is blue, like it’s going to boot. Wait. Oh no..”
Second sign of trouble:
This is it. This is all the Mac had to say? Not even a cryptic error message? I can just IMAGINE the confusion that would ensue if a typical, non techy Mac user (such as one portrayed by the…ahem, person in the Mac commercials) came across this image, blinking incessantly on screen where they expected their beautiful background and dock to be.
So I rebooted, knowing already that I was most horribly, utterly, (again, to use a common College-Now phrase,) hosed.
Third sign of trouble:
Upon reboot…
Oh well now we’re talking! This is much better! So informative and explanatory!
So the system is kaput, and I’m not sure what my next move is. I figure that I have two options, however.
One: I fix it myself. Who says Macs are inaccessible? I remove a (good few) screws and pop out the hard drive, then give data recovery a shot on my own, replacing the dead one with a bigger, hopefully more hearty MBPro compatible one. The con, however, is that it will void my warranty, which would be a shame, as the fans already need replacing because I’ve run them on full all the time due to the heat generated by rendering in Blender.
Two: I send it in to a (cr)Apple repair center. They fix it under warranty and two weeks later I get my system back, with no idea if the data would have been recoverable, or the security of the data that was on the hard drive, or really any information or guarantee that it won’t happen again. Great. At least I only lost about 2 weeks worth of data, the rest was backed up. Unfortunately, that two weeks included ALL the work on WNBG, as well as a bunch of daily models. :/
Opinions?
–Lace
