>My Mac died! Just as I’m preaching to people about having a Mac “because it just works — when I want to do something, I can always count on my Mac to just work”. Hard drives don’t always “just work” however. This particular HD was an 80 gig, and apparently has got some nice chunks all accross it.

I blame the power. When we had the A/C in the bedroom it was going out all the time. It would be sleeping and the power would go out. Where I’m sure it could recover from such a thing 25, even 50 times, I bet it happened over 100 times over the life of this thing between the last place and here. The last 2 years of my UPS’ life weren’t worth much. It didn’t hold much but got 4 good years of life prior to that and I’m just now going to throw it away, it’s a glorified extension cord at this point.

Regardless I had to take apart the Mac to find this out. I was able to boot into Unix and do a fsck on the HardDrive to find it couldn’t be repaired. So I popped it into my USB HD thingy and am currently running a data retrieval program on it. I’ll be lucky if I get everything back, I had a lot of pictures, but mainly music that I’d really like to save. I had over $700 worth of iTunes that I only partially backed up. Everything I got in the last year is not included in those backups, and anything before then I probably have elsewhere.

The VISTA reinstall went well, and am currently setting it up again, with setting a restore point as one of the first items on my list.