Powerbook Woes

So, a couple months ago, shortly after Tiger was released and installed, my Powerbook crashed. Well, it hung and I had to power it off–it didn’t come back quite right. I figured I did something nasty by the sudden power off, journaling filesystem be damned. I ended up re-installing Tiger again over a wiped hard drive and life seemed dandy again.

Until two weeks ago. System took a dive again. This time the Apple Hardware Test software is reporting errors with the hard drive. So it looks like the hard drive is toast, I’ll have to pay some $$$ to get it replaced since I never bothered with the extended warranty.

For a little while I was pissed at Apple. 1-year hardware warranty and I’m SOL unless I’d payed $350 (which I thought was a bit much) for AppleCare. Jokes on me, I’ll probably pay that much to get the HD replaced. Not really an expense I need right now.

But then I looked on the flip side. I’m using my Powerbook. How? External firewire hard drive. I’d used Carbon Copy Cloner (basically an rsync GUI) to make a complete, bootable copy of my system a while back. While I was using the OS. Booting into this system is as easy as holding down the option button after turning on the Powerbook. Boots seamlessly off the external hard drive, and even runs a bit faster I think because of faster HD speed. You can’t do that in Windows, and I imagine it would be a pain in Linux or any other OS.

So, while I no longer have a portable laptop until the internal hard drive is replaced, I’m got a very usable Apple desktop by virtue of an external hard drive. With the bluetooth mouse and keyboard I already had it’s actually even more usable. Even after this, I’m still a huge Apple fan. Hard drives have defects, they die. Shit happens. But at least I have a usable system while I wait.