Back in December 2007, an Apple system update locked me out of my computer [see MacBook Woes] and last week bad luck struck again, this time in the form of a hard drive failure. After coming home from class (on Tuesday night), my system was slow to respond to any input. After having to force quit iTunes and Firefox, I decided to reboot the system to see if clearing the RAM would solve my problem. Unfortunately, the system locked up while trying to shut down and I was forced to do a "hard" shut down (hold the power button until the computer turns off). Trying to reboot the system brought me to a blank white screen. It was getting late, so I removed the battery and left the computer sit overnight. Wednesday morning, I put the battery back in and the system still did nothing but show a blank screen. I tried to boot from the install disk to no avail. At this point, I'm starting to worry... Being back in college means having homework and projects to work on. Specifically, I had CS586 homework assignment due Wednesday afternoon (which, luckily, I printed the day before) and I had a CS525 project due Friday night [see Grad School Spring 2009] and the only copy of my project was located on my laptop, on the hard drive that I could not access...
In interest of not failing, I decided to skip a guest lecture from Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana talking about MySQL databases and scalability, and head on down to the Apple store on Michigan Avenue in hopes of recovering data from my hard drive. Initial reports from the Mac Geniuses were not good. They were not successful in booting my system from an external drive and after loading my hard drive up into a drive bay, they could not see the drive from another system either. Diagnosis: mechanical failure of the disk drive, information unrecoverable. Even though my system was out of warranty, they offered to replace my hard drive at no cost, and they also replaced the keyboard cover on my system which developed a crack a few months ago. While they were replacing the drive, I went to school in attempt to get an extension on my project because re-coding a B+ Tree Index on my Database Management System project would take more than the 60 hours I had left before the project was due.
Back at the Apple store, while replacing my hard drive, they attempted another data extraction with partial success! The guys at the Genius Bar were able to extract the data from my Desktop and some data in my User profile before running into corrupt data. The CS525 project I've been working on just happened to be located on my Desktop! I was able to continue my project from where I left off and turned it in on time. Not everything was saved. I had a few coding projects I was playing around with that were lost including a web based skydiving logbook, some code for Project Euler [see Staying Current in Programming Languages] that has helped me in CS549, but nothing that I can't live without. My laptop, back from the dead a second time, has been rechristened "phoenix" and I have learned my lesson about keeping backups of important files (luckily, all my music was already on an external drive).
