Laptop Hard Drive Failure :(

 When it rains it pours. It seems I’ve been having a bout of technological bad luck this year. Generally I count myself fortunate that technology seems to work for my 98% of the time. However, this last Monday, my luck changed. For the second time this year I lost a hard drive in one of my machines. In May it was the G4 desktop‘s data disk (it was configured with a data volume and a system volume). Fortunately I keep pretty regular backups and so all that was lost was some free iTunes videos and my music library which I was able to recover off of my iPod. This time the drive was sort of usable, which was good because I didn’t have a recent backup. I was able to mount it with Firewire target disk mode to the desktop and save most of the important files. As luck would have it, the iTunes library was gone as well as a few random photos taken with PhotoBooth. Generally, I consider my losses minor – besides, Oskar’s iPod had most of that music. I also took this as an opportunity to save myself the hassle of calling Apple Support for hours on end and upgrading the capacity and the spindle speed as well. Based on findings of similar upgrades others have done (before a complete failure) they experienced disk performance increases of at least 30%. I also upped the capacity to 200Gb which should give me some extra room for all of my missing iTunes music! I purchased the drive from ifixit.com, which I’ve used in the past. They offer great guides for assisting with the process and have pretty much any part you could want for your Apple laptop or iPod.