Wanderings and Wonderings

So Sunday night, my iMac shit the bed.

I'd been having strange problems the few months leading up to it. Mostly random freezes. I always notice when they happen because I leave Mail.app running all the time to filter my messages, so when my iPhone would start going batshit crazy, I'd know it had crashed again. It actually happened while I was at FWA this year, so all weekend my phone was constantly buzzing.

Well, Sunday while we were working in the yard, I had set up a DVD rip job to run, and while we were working it randomly reset itself and got all sluggish. That night, I tried to boot of the Snow Leopard DVD to run Disk Utility, and it couldn't even mount the drive and refused to repair it. Couldn't reboot either. I tried DiskWarrior, and that fixed things up enough to boot it, but it was REALLY SLOW (it took 10 minutes to boot). It was good enough to get the last few remaining files that hadn't been backed up yet onto the external drive. Then, I tried reinstalling, and it never came back. My conclusion, since I could still boot fine from the DVD, was dead hard drive.

The original hard drive was 500GB, but I figured I'd upgrade while doing this. Ordered a new 1TB hard drive via a deal at work and had it overnighted. It arrived yesterday. And, after some interesting surgery (who says you can't work on Macs!), got it installed, formatted, and Snow Leopard reinstalled.



You know, I remember the first computer I owned that crossed the 1GB barrier, back in late 1999. I guess I'll have to remember this one, too.