Life is grand

Back to Windows

I had forgotten how truly terrible the Windows command line is in comparison to any Unix-style command-line.

Then again, I’ve never had a hard-drive fail on me, in 16 years of computing, till yesterday when my MacBook Pro HD died (it is an Hitachi drive.) Mac OS X started locking up and Disk Utility reported errors all over. I booted into single user mode, ran fcsk and it reported the errors had been fixed. But the problems persisted and a few hours after the initial warning signs the system became unbootable. A reinstall doesn’t work, it gets 10 minutes into the process and then reports that the HD is not responding.

Thankfully everything, the entire drive, is backed up to a network share via the brilliant Time Machine.

I have ordered a replacement drive but that will only be delivered on Monday. So it is back to Windows on my old Compaq laptop for the next few days.

It is an odd experience having to find drivers for Windows XP after this last year or so of “it just works” on Mac OS X.

I am disappointed in the MacBook Pro. An HD really shouldn’t fail after just one year.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Chris Gallagher 9 months ago 1 point
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DOS is hell :(

How long before your HD arrives?

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paulmwatson 9 months ago 1 point
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Ordered it from Komplett and they say Monday.... so it could be Tuesday/Wednesday.

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James Mernin 9 months ago 1 point
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Tough break Paul.

Fortunately, you had a little warning some weeks ago and were able to take measures to prevent data loss.

It seems that, no matter what they do, the manufacturers of hard disks are always up against it as the increases in speed and capacity have to introduce some element of risk along the way.

You are correct though, it should not have failed after just one year - most disk drives have a far higher MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) than that. But then again, someone has to fall within the unluck spikes of those graphs too.

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IITQ 9 months ago 1 point
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Must be something in the air.

One of the drives in my server's RAID failed spectacularly last week, corrupting the entire data set until I isolated it. Thank God for ReiserFS and RAID 5. Rolled back the journal operating on 5 drives instead of 6 and continuing that way until I find a replacement on eBay.

Second time this year...

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Back to Windows

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