Farewell, dear friend…
Monday 12th November, 2007 | 7:12 pmClicking sounds from hard drives aren’t usually a good sign, especially when it’s accompanied by your screen freezing (which is very uncommon with OS X anyways) 
Sure enough, rebooting the MacBook just flashed the question mark icon meaning it couldn’t find a boot device, and the recovery DVD happily shows no internal drive in Disk Utility. Managed to borrow another MacBook and swapped drives and it’s definately the hard drive knackered. At least it’s not the MacBook itself at fault and 120Gb drives can be had for $75 from OWC which is the same place I purchased the 2Gb RAM upgrade from just after I got the MacBook. Apple would probably want double that for a stock 60Gb drive!
Given that the MacBook has been hammered constantly for 18 months with a few thousand photos going through it, all the podcasting and two months of bouncing around in car over the sumer, it hasn’t done too bad. Would still expect drives to last longer than this, but in fairness the only problem I’ve had in close to 5 years of my Medion laptop was a hard drive failure a couple of years back and then the MacBook has been flawless until now. Maybe I’m just cursed with hard drives! Least I’m fairly religious in running SilverKeeper to back-up everything to USB drive every weekend so I’ve not lost any music, photos or documents.
But, given the mail service up here (especially with the amount we’ve been getting weathered in the last week or so!), it could be quicker to wait for Santa Claus to do his rounds in order to get the new drive 
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Iain Foulds, 25 years old. Originally from England, now living in Bethel, Alaska where I work as a systems analyst for the school district. I've been involved in a number of open source projects for many years and used to produce two major music podcasts.