Last night, my macbook started having short freezes, and iPhoto wouldn't launch. I rebooted. The start sequence got stuck at the apple logo loading screen. Many reboots (safe mode, taking out and replacing battery, etc) all stayed at this screen.
I decided to take it to the Apple Store. Best case: running a disk utility would repair the error and make things good as new in 10 minutes. Worse: the logic board is broken, but no data loss. Even worse: the hard drive is hosed.
All morning I found myself mentally assessing the probabilities of each, hoping for a good outcome.
In late afternoon, I went to my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar. They connected an external hard drive and quickly declared that my hard drive failed, such that the partition is unreadable. "Your data is gone," they said cheerfully, to make sure I understood.
As I walked out of the store, I was surprised to find that I felt better. This was one of the worse outcomes. But now my mental background processes could start cataloguing the list of apps I need to reinstall, and non-backed up scripts to rewrite. Collapsing the waveform brought its own relief.
I think it's due to my myers-briggs being a J rather than a P. If I were a P, perhaps I would prefer the time of innocence, before knowing with certainty that my hard drive is toast.
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13 comments:
Before you toss your HD, try testdisk, which worked brilliantly for me, I recovered all my data. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk Good luck.
My MBP's hard drive failed the same way this month too :(
Interesting you should bring up M-B. For what it's worth, my new PC's HD became corrupt somehow recently. I was at a loss for what to do until a few hints on the web suggested I use the Vista install disc to run CHKDSK on the disk, and lo and behold, it worked. Still, hypothetically, I guess I would have preferred worried uncertainty to knowing my HD was fried. And last I checked -- years ago -- I was a little more "P" than "J".
(By the way, I have a pretty low opinion of Genius Bar help. The one time I went there for help with an iPod bug, the "genius" ended up looking up advice on Yahoo, right in front of me. And it was crummy advice to boot... I found better advice online afterwards. (I had done some brief Googling prior to visiting the Apple store.) Anyways, all this is to say I hope you can get your data back, whatever the "geniuses" think.
Hooray!, your back to blogging
I hope you backed-up! I make sure to back-up my photos by syncing my hard drive-based iPod with my PC every-so-often and making sure that my preferences under Photos in iTunes is set to original resolution.
I love Myers-Briggs! I remember it was one of the few corporate training sessions I had which I found useful - to learn a framework as to how to understand peoples' different personalities and preferences.
INTJ John
I hope you did some kind of backup!!!
Look the bright side, the year will start better, won't it?
What M-B personality axis is involved where my failure to properly match brackets in the previous comment gnaws at me?
Hmm. I'm slightly more "P" than "J", but I very strongly prefer certainty in this sort of situation, to the point where I can actually get offended when someone withholds bad news from me. So in my case the 4 bit resolution of the MBTI is insufficient here.
Niniane's definitely an INTJ.
Interesting blog.
I thought you could always retrieve the data from a hard drive unless it is physically damaged. I'm more of hardware dude than a software dude so what do I know? I'm not sure I trust the dudes at an Apple store though.
I'm an INTJ as well.
Computers... you put you trust in them and always leave you alone! They're all the same!
Hum.. I'm misleading :-)
Kiat, I will try TestDisk. Thanks for the suggestion!
Also, I am not INTJ. Close! I am INFJ.
Hi N! Did TestDisk work for you?
No, sadly TestDisk did not work. It could not read the drive in order to analyze partitions.
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