Sunday, November 22, 2009

Heading up to @IndianRoadCafe for some quality time with my novel...

...after one helluva weekend trying to get a computer to work reliably.  Last week, Thursday or Friday I think, I happened to pull up Disk Utility on my MacBook only to notice that my system drive was listed in red lettering.  I figured that wasn't good so I clicked on it and saw a message telling me that my system drive was in need of repair and that I should back up my data ASAP and replace the drive.  Sheesh.  Now, I'm a but of a gear-head and know nothing is as simple as swapping out a drive.  I mean, it should be, but it isn't.  So, I didn't want to risk getting half way through the job of replacing the system drive to find something totally screwed about my computer and be laptop-free in the middle of National Novel Writing Month.  No problem--I can just use my netbook, right?

Wrong.

Earlier in the week I had been trying to install Windows 7 on it and in the process trashed the XP install that was running on it.  So I decided to get some sort of light-weight OS onto the netbook and hope my MacBook lasted long enough to help me.  Luckily, it did. Unluckily, it took me two days and attempts at installing three OSes before I managed to get Easy Peasy up and running. 

Meanwhile, on a whim, I decided to try repairing my MacBook's system drive via Disk Utilities. After a few minutes it told me to repair the disk via my installation DVD.  Which was odd since when I click on the red lettering it tells me to replace the disk.  So, just now, I popped in my installation disk to find that inside Disk Utility's repair window, it said my disk was repaired.  However, the lettering is still red.  After running the repair routine again, it confirmed that my drive is OK.  Yet, the capacity and brand and model number are still colored red and S.M.A.R.T. status says "Failing" in red, as well.

So, I guess I'll just have to swap out the drive at some point. I have a backup drive I can sacrifice (though I don't want to since I'm already using it to back up stuff), but maybe I can reformat my system disk and use it for backups instead? 

 

Odd that I only recently uprgaded to OSX/10.6/Snow Leopard

Posted via web from thepete's posterous

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