After returning from my exam on Saturday my Powerbook G4 was making some odd noises and was completely unresponsive. After powering down and attempting to reboot a few times I knew something was amiss. My hard disk is dead. This is the one time when I hate Apple products. The laptops are notoriously hard for end-users to replace the hard drive! Of course, the new MacBook doesn't suffer from this problem, but I don't own one yet!

Since this is a holiday weekend I can't do anything until the morning when I'm going to call MacResQ to expedite a hard disk replacement/upgrade. I've been straining to fit everything on the puny 40GB disk in my laptop for a while, so I guess an upgrade to a 120GB drive is in the works. Of course, that just means that I need more space in my G4 Sawtooth tower — my old desktop which now serves as a file/backup server — to keep everything backed up.

On a good note, I did have a 3 day old backup of the /Users directory and I had just backed up my iPhoto library to 5 DVDs which now reside safely in the safe deposit box. So, if MacResQ isn't able to resurrect it for me and transfer my data to the new disk I haven't lost anything important. Considering this is the second major hard disk crash I have had this year — the first was in my desktop, which meant reinstalling everything on two brand new 120GB Seagate drives — I'm feeling pretty lucky.