It happened shortly before christmas. I was working with my MacBook (on the sofa) and all of a sudden I could only move windows around. Couldn't switch to another program, couldn't actually work with the program I had open. Very strange, I thought, this never happened before with my trusty OS X. The only thing I could do was to turn off the machine. Then it didn't want to reboot any more. On closer inspection, I realized that the disk was making a strange repetitive clicking noise and was constantly changing its rpm. Great, broken disk!I had been working for 4 days since my last backup. Lucky guy, you might think, but NO! 4 full days of coding work were lost, and of course in those days I managed to solve a lot of important problems. Later when I made up the lost work, I realized that I remembered quite well what it was, so I was finished in less than half the time, and it might even be better than the first version. But we will never be able to tell.
So I had to get a new disk. Top priorities for me are energy efficiency (especially in a notebook), low noise, and great performance/price ratio. This meant the very large disks and the very fast disks were out of the question. I settled with a Samsung HM320JI with 320 GB, which is a 5400 rpm model, so it runs cooler and quieter than the faster 7200 rpm drives. The speed is great, too, compared to my previous 120 GB drive.
Here's what I did to be able to work again:
- Replace the old disk with the new one. This is very easy now compared to the iBook. You can get the MacBook DIY hard drive exchange manual from Apple.
- Boot from the Mac OS X DVD and select the option to restore from a Time Machine Backup. Connect your external disk that contains the backup.
- Once the backup is detected, you can select what data you want to restore.
- The restore process takes some time, depending on how much data needs to be copied. In my case it took about 1,5 hours.
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