Day 364: Hard Drive Failure

Today marks the 365th day of owning a MacBook. And yesterday, day 364, it started freezing uncontrollably. So naturally, I rebooted. And to my dismay was welcomed with the 4 language ‘Please restart your mac’ screen.

So I restarted again, and again, and again. The first tech support person I talked to was an idiot, and he was in a rush to get me off the phone. So once I started running a Disc Repair, by booting from the Leopard CD, he said “Here is your case ID, good luck, and goodnight.” After 5 attempts, Disc Repair said ‘Unable to repair Disc’. The Tech guy told me if this happened I should try and install a fresh copy of leopard. In fact the convo went something like this:

I said “I’ve been using time Machine can’t I just restore from backup?”

He replies “First you have to install a fresh copy of Leopard, then run time machine in leopard and follow the instructions on how to restore from backup.” This all seemed really counter-intuitive to me and he could sense my disbelief.

So he said, “I will send you links to instructions on how to do this.”
Ok, Cool.

This is what he sent me. Wow, that’s not helpful at all.

So I did my own research and ran a ‘Restore from Time Machine Backup’ off of the Leopard install Cd. This finished in about 2 hours. Now when I booted, it got stuck at the moving gear apple logo screen.

Shit.

I rebooted in Verbose mode and was now greeted with this lovely repeating kernel message:

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).

Ran a Google search on the message, and turned up this site. Looks like I got a hard drive failure. So today, I re-dialed Tech Support. This guy, was more intelligent. I told him what I had uncovered from the google search and that I had a hard drive failure. He told me to boot from the Leopard Cd, run Disk Utility, and see if the drive is still Smart Verified. Yes, it was. But I told him I had read online that this exact problem has happened to several other people and in their case, their drive was also Smart Verified. He told me to hold on for 3-5 minutes as he checked Apples Tech Support database. He returned, told me I needed a new hard-drive. Reeeeeeaaallllly.

So, now I’m waiting for my new drive. Good thing I have AppleCare.

On another note: It sucks you can’t boot from a Time Machine backup. After this experience, I am thinking of buying a Time Capsule and using my current firewire drive for a nightly Caron Copy Cloner backup. Wow, even after this experience I want to spend $300 on a another Apple product. That’s power. Anyway, I cant produce my Thursday episode of 60 Seconds because of this hiccup and that sucks. Just wanted to vent to the world. Peace out.