Comments on Liveslogging the Death of My Six-Month-Old Macbooks Harddrive Whilst Trying Not to Lose My Shit in the Apple Store

Enough with liveblahblahing all of the petty and insignificant details of your lives here.

Try Drivesavers. If they can't fix it, it's free. If they can fix it, you're going to have to pay them a lot of money, though.

BUT MACS ARE SO WELL MADE. THEY NEVER CRASH AND ARE SO EASY TO USE.

Back up yo' shit up next time.

If you're still at the store, tell them that you're going to freak out and cause problems unless Apple offers a firmware update for AEBS to give it Time Capsule back-up capabilities via an air disk. Thanks.

Didn't you buy AppleCare? If not, why the fuck not?!? Apple's hardware is shit, everyone knows it, and you're a fool if you pay so much for a Mac but don't buy AppleCare for it.

What? Someone blaspheming the good and glorious name of Apple?

Beware, Steve J's henchmen will be looking for you.

Whilst? Are you British?

Ever heard of a backup? It's the 21st century after all.

yeah, that happened to me too. Taught me a lesson about backing up files...

AppleCare doesn't matter in this situation, your MacBook should have a one-year warranty, if you buy AppleCare it will kick in after the year is up and extend it 2 more. Although none of this really matters because if your drive is wiped, I doubt they will pay to have it recovered, or compensate you for your losses. Good luck.

I backup my entire drive to two separate external drives, and I backup my documents to two on-line repositories. I'm pretty well covered in case of a catastrophe.

At least in a MacBook you can replace the drive yourself. I've done it in both mine and my partner's.

As for quality, Apple stuff is generally pretty good (contra some of the spouting above) but *nothing* is guaranteed with any computer. So back up!

odd, mine broke after six months too...thank god for my IT guys, they backed it all up...

hard drives crap out. a LOT. especially laptop hard drives.

Backup.

I am so sorry. I feel your pain!

I'm actually surprised at how rare fatal hard drive failure really is. I've had six Macs in the past 17 years and not one has suffered hard drive failure.

I've also administered small networks and have very rarely seen total failure...even in machines that almost never get turned off.

Of course when they do go, it's a major bummer if you haven't backed up.

It's because were fucking sick of hard drives crashing that we need Barack Obama in the White House!

Am I right? Am I???

All hard drives die, Apple or not. And, of course, Apple did not make the hard drive, so it doesnt really have a thing to do with them, anyway.

But, yeah, fucking sucks just the same. Several and separate backups are the only answer, and sadly inconvenient. Time Machine is a huge step forward, now we just need insane and free bandwidth so we can do the same thing remotely.

@11 - the warranty covers the hardware, not the data. They'll replace the drive, but the data on it is always the owner's responsibility.

I think I'm in love with the Bascule guy in the Lovelab ad! He's so cute! Okay, I will probably fall in love with any person who doesn't hate fat grrls and mentally ill people, but...well, I don't even know if he qualifies for that! I know this has nothing to do with the post. I just had to blurt this out!!!!

There's a reason they made Time Machine. It's not hard to use, just plug in a HD. I just plug in my PowerBook when I get to my desk at night.

Use SuperDuper! on a USB HD. It will make a bootable clone of your HD that on schedule will automatically keeps itself up to date with all your latest data. That way if your HD dies you can still boot your machine and keep on working until you can get a replacement.

It works over the network too, just takes a little more geekery.

Apple's Time Capsule is also good, backs up all changes and updates every hour over wireless, but unlike SuperDuper! you have to wait for it to restore your system. You can't boot off of a time machine backup immediately and keep working. In your case, you'd still have to wait to have your HD replaced.

So yeah, SuperDuper! is good shit.

Hillary Clinton has the hard-earned experience necessary to deal with your failed hard drive.

A. All computers use hard drives. Being mechanical, they are prone to failure.

B. Apple makes no claims that their computers magically prevent this failure.

If you're within warranty, get it fixed, restore from backup. If not, decide if the out-of-warranty cost is worth it. When my PowerBook's hd died, I just replaced it myself and recovered from a backup (at that point, made nightly).

If you don't have backup, pay drive savers over $3000 and don't be such a dumbass next time; is time machine really that hard to use?

Typed from my iPhone, because my computers are all sleeping.

I got a new hard drive for my mac i book at fryes for half the price, ( they are apple certified)and they copied my old hard drive for free.. after the mac store tried and said it couldn't be done. plus I have had my laptop repaired free twice sans applecare,both after warrantee expired.. call apple, and don't ever give up or take no for an answer. ( obama sez)

If you had Tiger version of the MacOS and used the automatic backup, it should be very easy just to replace the drive and "restore" it.

Unless you didn't do that ...

serves you right bitch ass mac user.

Yah, time machine is awesome! Although, I am being a complete dumbass and haven't backed up my laptop yet.

PSA: backups

Apple's shit sucks...

i love the apple, but let this be a lesson to everyone about applecare, always get it. in the last few weeks my BF's and then my macbook pros had screen issues that needed to be repaired, and i had to switch out my iphone 2x. luckily we had applecare, as the laptops were 13 months old.

Apple computers are, sadly, still subject to the laws of physics.

Apple didn't MAKE the HDD, though.

In any case, most computer users had this happen at some point in the 90s, and we do backups now. Consider yourself lucky that it took you this long to have a drive failure. :)

Sorry to hear about your MacBook.

I disagree about all their hardware being crappy. I'm typing this on my MacBook right now, which has been running with no problems since August 2006. And my husband's MBP from November 2006 hasn't given him any problems either.

The people at IBM are saying "Ha, Ha!" and pointing.

I hadn't refreshed Slog in a while on this computer, and the latest story that was posted at the time was Jonah's Xbox dying. Refresh? BAM, Macbook dying. Someone's out to get you, Jonah.

i'm so sorry. that's always sad. did you send it to the apple hospital?

What @1 said!

Jonah, this sounds an awful lot like the most annoying of ECB posts. Meanwhile, the driver's side mirror of my car was busted while it was parked in front of Quinn's. Who should give a rip?

my macbook's harddrive shit the bed 4 months after i bought it. i wanted to strangle the guy at the genius bar when he asked me if i had backed it up. no i had not backed it up you smug fuck my computer is only FOUR MONTHS OLD. i warned my friends who also had macbooks and even with that warning the same thing happened to their macbooks. i've yet to reload everything onto my computer and when i do i will buy an external harddrive and back it up.

It's things like this that remind me why I never use computers.

Sorry, but the fact that Mac stuff is totally proprietary is one of its weaknesses. It's easy to say 'all hard drives fail' in the same way one can say 'All cars break down'
Well, yes, but at least with a PC I built myself I can rely on my experience to build it. And if it does happen to screw up there's a thousand places I can take it to to get it fixed. At our graphic design place, we have one PC. I use it because it's the one computer that screws up the least. Anecdotal evidence, yes, but I like actually controlling my computer rather than relying on some guy at the only store in the city to fix it when it fucks up.

Booooring.

To everyone who suggested backing up: dur. Thanks.

I didnt lose everything, but this is all an unbelievable pain in the ass. And, as someone else said, when my computer's this new, its not supposed to fucking up and die like this. I've had drives go bad, but there's generally some warning sign: noisy platters, lagging performance, etc. I've never had an hdd be working one second and toast the next.

im happy to see that lots of the most obnoxious obama folks are also PC's. I guess Obama isn't a mac after all.

The Drive Savers hall of fame is hilarious.

Time Machine is your friend - and it's been part of the Mac OS for quite a while now.

But you actually have to use it.

I'm in a pissy mood tonight so I revisited this post.

A. If you're not backing up because "BUT MY COMPUTER IS NEUW!!11" you're a dumbass. Disaster can strike at any point. You should always have backup in place. If you just got a new computer to replace an old one, why don't you have an old backup system you can plug the new computer into? (An external hard drive to use, etc.)

You deserve it (maybe not Jonah, because with the RRoD this kinda sucks all at once).

B. Macs are not "proprietary". Macs are not "custom" computers. Macs don't "break more often" than some piece of shit you build at Fry's and stuck a bunch of fucking ugly-ass cold-cathodes in because you think it looks "badass".

They are PCs built using open standards. The one difference is that they don't have a BIOS because Apple wasn't stupid enough to keep perpetuating the bullshit freetards and Windows users have to suffer (namely a 20 year old technology).

We can emulate BIOS if we need to, and adopting it would have been a step down from open firmware. Now we have EFI and other PC manufacturers aren't using it because they don't really care about progress.

If you use Linux, you have NO say in this argument; you're used to putting up with so much bullshit that you're completely desensitized to the needs of a normal person.

If you use Windows, it's more closed than OS X. The entire Mac subsystem (Darwin) is open source, along with the basis for the browser (Webkit).

Yeah, maybe the PC you built has better components, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about a laptop. Did you build one of those too? Can you fix it yourself? If not then please shut the fuck up.

And because everyone else is too stupid to look at the vast number of awards Apple's customer service has won (statistically significant denotations), I'll offer my own anecdote (which seems to be enough to convince anyone here).

My GF's Dell laptop had a motherboard, video card (twice), hard drive, and optical drive replaced within 2.5 years. My PowerBook has had one problem (Hard drive failure). Her "interoperable so magical fucking open PC architecture" didn't do shit for me to fix any of that stuff (can you find a Dell service manual for a given laptop online?) But I was able to download instructions online on how to open my PowerBook and replaced the HD myself.

** So fucking pissed off at the blind motherfuckers who talk shit about things they can't begin to understand, signing out **

feelin a little insecure about your mac purchase there Jason?

My backup hard drive and my computer died that same day -- they were on a surger protector but got fried when the power in my building massively spiked.

The next day an outlet blew up and the place next door caught on fire.

So can everyone stop being so judgmental?

@8: Seriously.