O.L. Design

The harddrive in my beloved iBook crashed earlier this week! I could hear it coming, since the drive had started to produce a slightly odd sound some days earlier. I was lucky to have a pretty complete backup of all my important stuff though. But it wasn’t totally problem-free. I soon discovered that I had forgotten to backup my mail box, and I lost a year or two worth of e-mails. Not so funny.

This was actually my second harddrive crash ever in my 16 years or so of using computers, and it was the first one to happen on a laptop. It made some pretty funny noises when it was dying, and I must say I regret that I didn’t record some of those “metal-on-metal” screeches. It would’ve been fun to have.

Anyway, I bought a new drive on the Thursday following the crash, a Hitachi 2.5″, 40GB, 5400 rpm drive, then got home and grabbed my micro tools, and started to dig my way into the heart of my little apple-branded toy. With the invaluable help from the PB Fix It Guide Series, I pretty easily, though not totally without effort (we’re talking about 40 or something mini-sized screws here), managed to replace the dead drive with the new one. Afterwards, the iBook started up flawlessly, and now I’m sitting here, writing, and enjoying the performance boost the new 5400 rpm drive gave me (the old one was a 4200 rpm drive). It’s also a lot more quiet now, you can barely hear the familiar rattling noises the read/write-heads make. As they say: when something bad happens, there’s always something good coming out of it in the end.