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Rattling sound is normal!


May 18, 2007 - 4:38 p.m.

Suzanne's MacBook died inexplicably the other day. She was typing on it out on the porch swing, and it went black and shut down. No life. I had her call Apple and they talked her through all the usual revival tricks, like resetting the power-management unit (PMU) and the Open Firmware. No life at all. They sent a box and DHL picked the thing up this morning so it could get fixed.

True to form, she had no backup of the drive, and knowing that if the repair is nontrivial, Apple will simply ship her a new machine and refurb the old one at its leisure, I pulled the drive out to back it up to a disk image. Several obstacles there... for one, once I pulled out the remarkably-easy-to-remove drive (it's just off the battery compartment, not buried way down deep in the guts like my iBooks) I found that the drive is not a parallel ATA, like the iBooks, it's serial ATA, meaning I couldn't just plop it into one of my many external FireWire/USB drive enclosures and back it up to the iMac. Instead, I ended up plugging it into the SATA controller in my Windows 2000 server and using SelfImage to write it to an .IMG file, which I should then be able to mount on the iMac once its 72-Gb enormity gets done traversing the network.

Apple said her machine should be back next week, and if it has her original drive in it, fine... we just compress and archive the backup I shot of it and move on. If it's a new machine, I get to pull the drive from it and clone her old disk's image back to it and hope it comes up OK.

I really should get her an external drive to back stuff up. She has several hundred MP3s and quite a few hundred images and videos (like the wabbit videos) which exist nowhere else. On my machines, I habitually clone irreplaceable files to other machines on the network, whichever one has more free space on it. Sure, I waste a lot of space on redundancy, but huge drives are cheap and I have a bunch of them. I haven't lost an important file in years.

I notes with amusement that the Toshiba SATA drive in it has a big message on it: RATTLING SOUND IS NORMAL


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