Up until just a few days ago, I haven’t had any serious problems with a Mac that have required me to take the unit in for professional attention. That doesn’t mean that I’ve had a trouble free computing experience, just that I’m pretty good at troubleshooting and know how to find information on the internet.

I was using my Macbook Friday night when it suddenly just froze up. I waited awhile and couldn’t get any response from the unit, so I held the power button down until it turned off and then tried to restart it. I waited for what seemed forever and didn’t get past the white startup screen (before the Apple logo however) so I powered off and tried again. No luck. I tried one more time, but this time left the unit alone for about 5 minutes. When I came back I had the blinking question mark over the folder. No System folder found. Just great.

I read around on the internet some for suggestions. I tried resetting the PRAM. I tried resetting the PMU. I meditated. Finally I booted off my Restore DVD and went into Disk Utility. The harddrive didn’t even show up there at all, so I couldn’t verify or repair the disk. I used Terminal and didn’t see it mounted at all in /dev, so I was getting wary about the actual health of the disc by then.

I finally got fed up and just went and booted into Leopard off of my external hard drive and messed around more in there. I was hoping to find a way to grab some data off of the drive because I had been coding an application for a class and was at about 600 lines of code when the thing died. I was out of luck as I couldn’t even mount the drive. I was going to try and hook it up some other way (I have a IDE to USB and laptop IDE to USB cable tucked away for just the emergencies) but I forgot that this is a serial drive. So, I just decided to work off of Leopard for the rest of the night and pray I didn’t have a power outage and then go to the Apple Store in the morning.

The guy at the counter was really nice and let me talk first before interrupting me and asking me questions that I was telling him the answers to begin with. He was very knowledgeable and made me feel respected and that is a big thing for me. I spent a lot of time Friday night trying to work the problem out myself. If I had went into the store and the guy had cut me off short and then did all the stuff that I did to come back 45 minutes later and inform me that the drive was physically bad, I would have been upset. Not the case however. The nice Mac Genius listened and then said, “Sure sounds like the drive is bad.” He then offered to try to get the drive to mount in another laptop just to make sure it wasn’t my laptop’s serial connection or anything internally, which pleased me because he wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

After affirming the drive was indeed dead, he offered to replace it if he had one in stock. I was about to get upset at this point because I needed my Macbook back ASAP so I could code that afternoon and couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Thankfully he had another hard drive in stock and replaced it quickly. We then booted the Mac off of a firewire drive with Tiger installed just to make sure my Macbook read the drive okay, I signed a warranty paper, and I was out the door.

Overall this had potential to be a very nasty experience. I wished that I could have retrieved some data off of the drive (I had made a backup of stuff on Monday of that week, so I wasn’t out that much) but the time to get the drive processed wasn’t worth the effort as I wouldn’t need anything off of it by then. I’m also not sure if there would have been a fee involved or not. I wonder…

I’m glad to have my Macbook back up and running and I have to say that I’m very pleased with the service I received at the Apple Store. Too bad I they turned me down for a Mac Specialist position, I would have been very happy working there!