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Oh noooo!!!

Chundles

Chundles

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jul 4, 2005
12,037
493
Yup. This post is coming from a bloody PC. My iBook - the brillant machine it was decided to turn my HDD into an unreadable mess of little ones and zeros.

I woke it up on Saturday morning and thought, gee this thing's a bit slow this morning so I kicked it in the guts and restarted. Nothing. 30 minutes on the Apple with grey spinning thingy. Try again. Nothing. Try again. Not even the Apple. Put 10.4 disc in a boot from that. Run disk utility. What disc? Disc Utility froze. Try again. Disc Utility. Ah, there's my HDD, repair permissions............almost, froze. Try again. What HDD? F@#K!!

Off to the AppleCentre. Boot from 10.4 disc. Repair Disc.......almost......almost.....3 hours later and about a thousand errors later.....nothing.

So here I am using my Dad's HP laptop - it's nice and all but Windows just irritates me. A friend of my father's is a Mac technician on the side so he has it. Said it was amazingly difficult to even find the HDD when booting from an external drive. A lot of the stuff is fragmented and it just looks ugly. He says I've probably lost everything - all my photos from the last 8 weeks or so - all my uni work from the last year - all my music, contacts, everything. Now, a lot of that is backed up on my iPod and CD's but there was some stuff there that I just forgot I had and hadn't had a chance to backup just yet.

He'll be able to do more work midweek and will probably put in a new 40GB drive so I'll get 10GB more storage out of it but my iBook let me down just at the time when I really didn't want it to. I still love it but just a bit less right now.

Poop poop double-poop.
:(
 
That's crap. Did you get any sign this was going to happen? Usually a hard drive fails slowly and gives you plenty of warning. It'll slow down, act funny and start faintly clicking in most cases.

Hopefully it won't be long before it's back an you'll get most of the data from it. FWIW, I find Target Disk Mode to be the most durable way of getting access to a dead hard drive. It seems to be slightly better than running the thing in an external closure for some reason. :)

In the meantime Chundles, good luck with XP. :p
 
Chundles said:
He says I've probably lost everything - all my photos from the last 8 weeks or so - all my uni work from the last year - all my music, contacts, everything. Now, a lot of that is backed up on my iPod and CD's but there was some stuff there that I just forgot I had and hadn't had a chance to backup just yet.
Click to expand...

This is why .Mac exists. ;)
 
i feel your pain ..... remember if you have lost your recent iTunes purcahases you can get the iTunes team to let you download them again
 
liketom said:
i feel your pain ..... remember if you have lost your recent iTunes purcahases you can get the iTunes team to let you download them again
Click to expand...

That's the beauty of Senuti. I can get all my music back when I get back my laptop.
 
That really sucks. I just had a HDD fail with my entire video project on it- the only copy, seeing as my film teacher made us consolidate space and delete all backup copies of our films.

Hope it gets fixed soon! At least you get an extra 10GB out of it!
 
mad jew said:
That's crap. Did you get any sign this was going to happen? Usually a hard drive fails slowly and gives you plenty of warning. It'll slow down, act funny and start faintly clicking in most cases.

Hopefully it won't be long before it's back an you'll get most of the data from it. FWIW, I find Target Disk Mode to be the most durable way of getting access to a dead hard drive. It seems to be slightly better than running the thing in an external closure for some reason. :)

In the meantime Chundles, good luck with XP. :p
Click to expand...

Sorry mj, I meant he booted my laptop from an external bootable drive he already had - everything else on the iBook is fine but the HDD is definitely farked. I noticed some network slowness at the internet cafe but I just thought it was cause it was packed with spotty teenagers playing WOW. It was working fine and then boom. There really wasn't any prior signs.

Christ I hate XP though. This laptop is fantastic but it just took me 30 minutes to download a driver for my printer - wouldn't download three times and Norton (yeah, I know - remember, this isn't my computer) keeps telling me things I don't want to know. It's amazingly cumbersome to use. I'm just about to go get Firefox so I can stop using IE - I can't believe how frustrating it is to use. And no spellcheck when posting too... what a load of crap.
 
OH sadness! My hardrive also died on me, but died as i was using it. There i was working on my CS assignment, when things started to beachball. It wasnt just the compiler, but then safair beach balled, quicksliver, everything i had running was dead. I then tried to shutdown but it wouldnt. So i hardbooted it, put it back into my crumpler bag, and went home. I left it alone since i didnt want to deal with my CS homework. Anywho, about 5 hours later i try to start it and realize it wouldnt boot. I then did what you did. I called applecare and we found out that there was some kind of error and i had to send it in. Wasn't too bad, i got the box a day later. sent it in, and got it back 2 days later. So here i am typing on my brand spakin new hardrive.

Not all is well since i did loose a fair amount of work. The most i regret was my vast collection of wallpapers, but...oh crap...i wrote a letter and...sigh..i did lose something important. Well luckily my dad is now willing to get me an external drive. I asked for one but he just replied sarcastically "well its apple, that means nothing will ever go wrong." I know he was implying that i should get one but in all reality he was telling me no. its wierd.
 
Felldownthewell said:
That really sucks. I just had a HDD fail with my entire video project on it- the only copy, seeing as my film teacher made us consolidate space and delete all backup copies of our films.
Click to expand...
I wonder if he (she?) ever worked in a studio or something before. I doubt it, as most pros make multiple backups of current projects.
 
arghh

I had that happen to me last term, lost all my school work for the term and a bunch of personal stuff too.

Reminds me to back up tonights work cause it would be a bastard to redo it

Sorry it happened but it does happen.
 
Your case was an accident. I'm just stoopid x 4 billion

So while I read Chundle's HD woes, of course I decided to back up my documents and photos.

So anyway, I had 2 Finder windows open --- one to my backup HD, and one to my personal documents folder with all my PhD stuff. Since I'm such a genius and all, I was going to drag my "PhD STUFF" folder over to my backup HD so that my "PhD STUFF" folder in my backup HDD was up to date. It contains my PhD work over the past 6 weeks, a bunch of journal articles related to my research, etc. The thing about my backup HD is that it looks eerily similar to my HOME directory on my PowerBook.

Anyway, instead of dragging my work from my PowerBook harddrive to my backup, I dragged my PhD work from my backup HD to my PowerBooks HD!!! :eek: So yes, I just reverted to my progress from 6 weeks ago. :mad: :( :rolleyes:

If it wasn't for some file attachments I sent to my supervisor, one very important piece of work would have been missing completely. Luckily I just went into Mail and salvaged what I could.
 
Counterfit said:
I wonder if he (she?) ever worked in a studio or something before. I doubt it, as most pros make multiple backups of current projects.
Click to expand...

Many a time on a post project I've not been able to do backups of a project in progress simply due to the fact that I don't have enough storage capacity (I currently only have 2TB) and I ping that all the time. :(

It's one of the main reasons that I don't do more post work because of the storage expense alone. :eek:

Though I'm currently in the process of backing up non post work, I've gotten rid of a hundred or so Zip discs (though I've kept 6 of those that weren't scrawled on for posterity :D) and hundreds of CD-R's and DVD-R's.

The dream being that I want everything backed up on Dual Layer DVD's (which will significantly reduce the physical size of my archive) and allow me to have all my work archived at 2 different locations (something I'm a little lapse about at the mo)... roll on Blu-ray though. :D
 
That sucks big time. :(

I have TWO hard drives that I back up to every week, sometimes more if i've changed/added stuff. I'd freak out if I lost a lot.

Luckily my drive failure crept up slowly and I knew it was on the way out so managed to salvage stuff the previous back up had missed.

And stuck on a Windows Laptop? Double whammy! :eek:
 
Sorry to hear about your troubles and lost data, BUT (and people have already said it etc)

BACK UP YOUR F**KING STUFF!!!!!!! everyone that is reading this thinking "my HD is fine" then take this as a warning, back your stuff up!
 
OK, I've been using this thing properly for two days and apart from the very, very nice and bright 14" widescreen (minus the stupid glossy coating that means I have to have my window closed to see the screen without reflections) and popping the start bar to the top, bunging the 10.4 default background as my wallpaper, Windows is driving my absolutely nucking futs.

It took me half an hour to get a driver for my printer (three different downloads failed then it took ages to download. I can't find a decent (and free) DVD -> mp4 converter that doesn't require a thorough knowledge of the command line (This is a 1.8GHz Pentium M compared to my 1.2GHz G4 so I was hoping to do some serious encoding during the night), no Dashboard seriously sucks and I'm paranoid about downloading anything in case a: it's dodgy or b: it's not dodgy but somehow interferes with something Dad can normally do and will get him on my case.

Oh, and it takes ages, and ages to boot up - all those silly programs on the right hand side of the start bar just seem to take ages to load and then when you think you're done.......there's more of them.

I miss my 6 pin Firewire port. Good thing I have a 3G iPod so I got the 6 pin to 4 pin adapter free with it. Can't use my iPod mini though because Windows can't read HFS+ formatted iPods.

Windows Explorer isn't too bad a file browser and if I get the chance I'm going to log onto a network and remind myself just how good networking on Windows is. When it works I love being able to browse networked computers as though they were folders on my computer rather than that stupidly irrtating and convoluted method of hunting down individual folders and mounting them on my desktop. It really is the only thing I miss.

Damn I miss my iBook though, I hope it's fixed soon and fixed good.
 
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