Thursday, October 11, 2007

'Put your PowerBook into the Freezer...'

Today my PowerBook's harddrive decided to die on me... after returning from lunch and doing a routine email check, my HD decided to freeze-up and started to make clicking/purring noises. I instinctively tried to force quite applications and restart my CPU... no response. So I proceeded to do a 'hard' restart and powered off. When I tried to power back on I knew something was amiss because I got a distorted Apple logo and it wouldn't boot... I eventually got the black warning screen telling me that I required to restart my computer (in 8 different languages). So, I proceeded to follow the instructions and powered down, waited a minute and tried to power back up. This time I didn't even get the Apple logo... I got a blue screen with a blinking folder icon with the OSX symbol and a flashing ? mark. I think I had a mini-stroke at that moment...

After regaining my composure, I went to break the news to the rest of the office... luckily I had Rob in the office at the time (who has seen a fair amount of tech/hardware issues in his days as a designer), who suggested that I 'Put the PowerBook into the Freezer'. What? Yes, I didn't hear wrong... so I did.

Low and behold, after allowing the CPU to cool for a while (as I tried to recall the 9GB of work in progress I had on my machine), I went to boot it up again. This time, to my amazement it booted up! I was able to login and managed to back-up all my important stuff onto an external HD. Phew! Thanks to Rob for the 'crazy' idea... more to come

1 comment:

Unknown said...

my screen looks like each icon is split into 4 seperate images , one of each is clear as day the rest are criss cross lines. also get the restart message .