I’m back. Over the last 10 days I’ve been operating on a slow and old Power Macintosh G3. A green and white no less. It’s been a bit frustrating, but there’s not much I could do about it.
You see, the hard drive in the PowerBook G4 I use suffered a horrible little death and to make matters worse, I didn’t have a comprehensive backup strategy in place in the event of a catastrophic failure. I think I had about a fifth of the 60 gig hard drive backed up — not nearly enough. I know, I know. A guy that works in the tech industry should be smarter about such things. I think I was lulled into a false sense of security after using Mac’s for 24 years. Never a significant problem in all that time.
So the story begins. Hard drive fails. I wield my significant powers to resurrect the device, but despite all my wooing and massaging, I get no love from the drive. At that point, I knew I was screwed and Ontrack was likely in my future. Yet, I hauled myself down to the Apple Store Rosedale Center to let the crew there have a look at it. That was the second time I’d been in the store and I was impressed with the setup. I might devote a post about the place at a later time. Suffice it to say, the two techs that I explained my problem to and subsequently worked with could not help any further with the hard drive. I knew that going into the place anyway — so I would say I wasn’t disappointed about the results there. I believed Ontrack, which I’d never used before either in a personal or professional environment, was the place my drive would ultimately be the destination for my beloved hard drive contents.
Enter iFixit. I pulled up their site after remembering it being mentioned in a computing mailing list at work. Their directions are excellent for accessing and components within your computer. First rate. I was able to rip out my hard drive with little trouble.
I called Ontrack up, started a case with them and quickly had a job worked up. Fairly smooth process if you ask me. I was actually more impressed with the speed with which they worked once they had the drive in hand. I think it was 36 hours from the time they had the drive until they had it ready for shipment back to me with all my data recovered.
They got it all. I paid a handsome sum of money to get everything back, but it was well worth it. The turn-around was very quick and of course, the outcome was what I hoped for all along.
Since iFixit was solid in delivering directions, I bought a replacement hard drive through them. Yes, it’s a bit quicker and larger than the stock drive that comes with 17″ Aluminums. Yay.
I actually got the data returned from Ontrack sooner than the replacement hard drive. Never thought that would happen.
I’m in the process of getting things back to normal now. It’ll take a little bit to resume “normal,” daily operations but it’s better than the alternative of not having my files again.
Thanks Ontrack. Thank you iFixit. You saved me. I named my new hard drive, Lucky, to pay homage to how I feel about the eventual outcome to this curveball that I never saw coming.
