Hurrah! My Macbook Air is finally fixed! And it only took a
month... The hard drive died when we went on holiday to Cheltenham
(apparently it's still a bad idea to travel with them in suspend mode
- I thought things like that were pretty ok, now?). Fortunately, the
failure mode was that it eventually succeeded when doing most reads,
so I managed to back up most of the stuff I wanted after the
event.
Things I have learnt include:
- Back-ups are useful.
- When making disk images, large archives, etc., avoid FAT32, as
files only go up to 4G. Useful.
- Apple's disk imaging software is a big girl's blouse in the face
of read errors. Log the error, skip the sector and carry on? Ha! Give
up immediately? Of course!
- Caroline relies on the internet an awful lot.
- Using a computer connected via the telly is really a lot less
convenient than a laptop.
- Official Apple repairs are expensive.
- Even unofficial SSD storage is still eye-watering in price.
- You can buy pretty much anything off e-bay, but it might take some
time to arrive if there's a cloud of ash in the sky.
- The innards of Macbook Airs are fiddly...
- But actually straightforward enough to deal with, given
instructions off the internet, and a brand-new Philips #00
screwdriver.
Posted 2010-05-08.