Double Disk Failure

You'd think I'd be good at this. You'd think I'd be disciplined. I've had enough catestrophic hardware failures in my life, that you'd think I'd have a regular backup strategy of the important files on my main computer (a Macbook). You'd be right. Well, at least I did up until my back-up drive died...over a year ago.

Pretty useless strategy when your main hard-drive dies.

Normally, this wouldn't be as catastrophic as it sounds. Except that I'm in Germany, and I don't know where to go to find parts or restore the data on my drive. Nor do I even have my OS X disks (or any disks, for that matter, to even try Ubuntu) or the tools to repair the laptop. Fortunately, I have an iPod Touch, which proved invaluable for finding information and stores. I was able to try a number of steps to see about recovery, even with these obstacles.

First, I tried to install Ubuntu to a thumb-drive and boot from there. I have a thumb drive on hand, and could download Ubuntu (using my flatmate's laptop), so this was a good, free option. Following this guide, I had no problem setting up the thumb-drive. However, it turns out, that Macbooks won't boot Linux from USB drive. I haven't yet looked into whether or not it needs to have the right partition table, but looking around the web, it doesn't seem to be possible.

Second, I found an electronics store - Saturn - and bought some CD-R's^[1] and a copy of OS X: Snow Leopard. My second, less-then-free-but-still-cheaper-than-buying-a-new-hard-drive strategy was to install Snow Leopard to an external USB hard-drive, which I happen to have on hand. Following this guide, I began by formatting and repartitioning the disk. Remember when I mentioned that I'm in Germany? Well, it seems that this disk did not exactly survive the flight here in my luggage. The format failed repeatedly, using Disk Repair failed repeatedly, and even when it seemed to work, the install would fail immediately when attempting to write to disk. At least, I was able to verify that it was only the Macbook's disk was broken.

Third, I found another electronics store - Conrad - where I could buy a new hard-drive (double the size of the old one, so there's one silver lining) and the tools to replace it. 70 Euro later, and I have the parts to fix things^[2]. Thanks to iFixit and their tutorial for replacing the hard-drive, I was able to easily install a copy of Snow Leopard.

So, I'm left with a clean laptop^[3], and the task of restoring all my applications. This is a bit of a pain, since some of them don't run on Snow Leopard (I'm looking at you Microsoft Office 2004), and I don't have the disks on hand for others (Adobe Creative Suite). I'll have to find some open-source alternatives, in the mean time.

It's a relief having it back up and running. Aside from being my personal development space, it currently is my communication platform and my entertainment platform. I've lived with out a computer before, but it takes a week to get over the hole it leaves in my life. I'm glad it only took a few days to plug that whole back up.

[1] The CD's were for creating a bootable Ubuntu CD, as a backup plan.

[2] Total cost: 102.70 Euro - Not too bad really

[3] I have yet to find a place to recover the data from my old disk, but I may wait until I'm back in the States.