Labored

Saturday, we went to John and Sam's house to celebrate John's birthday, and Mom's, and a friend of John's whose birthday is also in September. Sam's parents and her sister Kim and Kim's husband were there, too, since Sam's parents had come to town last weekend for John's art exhibition. It was crowded, but it worked out pretty well, and we had a great time. There was cake, and lots of noise, and playing outside with the neighbor's dog, and lots of good food.


And then came my Weekend Of Fun. (That was sarcasm.)

It started, as these things often do, with the internet.

"Huhn," Matt said Sunday morning, scrolling through his usual slurry of newsfeeds. "The Snow Leopard upgrade disc is actually the whole thing. It says in this article that it'll work to upgrade any prior OS, or even on a completely blank disk."

"Huhn," I said. "So, can I borrow your Snow Leopard disk, please?"

One reboot later, I was looking at the install screen and clicking on choices. English, yes. American English, yes. The hard drive, yes. Yes, yes, yes... Go! It started installing, and I walked away to fix Penny's lunch.

A bit later, Matt came into the kitchen. "It says there's some problems and needs to run the repair," he said.

Eh, bad sectors happen. "Go ahead and tell it to go," I said.

A few minutes later, Matt came back into the kitchen. "It, um, didn't work," he said.

Well, dang. No Snow Leopard for me, I guess. I went out to look at the computer. There was an awful lot of text detailing the problems, and some of it was in red. "Irreparable. Please back up your hard drive as soon as possible, then reformat and re-install."

Well, crap.

"I've got a copy of DiskWarrior," Matt said. I let him run it while I finished my lunch and gave Penny her shot.

It didn't work, either, though it generated even more text. Words like "disk malfunction" and "will most likely worsen" jumped out at me. I started cussing and whining at my twitter followers.

Just out of curiosity, I attempted a reboot without a CD in the drive anyway. The computer churned for four or five minutes, then turned itself off. I ran DiskWarrior again, and got the same result. Interestingly, though the text suggested a hardware malfunction, when I ran the hardware diagnostics, I got an all-clear.

Okay. First step: backup my stuff. Luckily, all the stuff that would kill me to lose (like my writing and my very favorite pictures) is all in online repositories like Google Sites and Flickr, but I still have a buncha gigs of music and a buncha gigs of movies and a buncha gigs of less-beloved pictures that I would be pretty pissed to lose. Matt had a spare hard drive I could use (he's going to upgrade his main hard drive with it eventually) but not an enclosure to fit it to let it function as an external drive.

Braz has a whole bunch of empty enclosures, though, so he volunteered to loan me one. We packed up the kids and went over to Braz's, and spent a couple of hours hanging out and playing Rock Band, which was fun and helped de-stress me a bit. I took a cute picture with my iPhone of Alex playing drums.


Then we went home, and I hooked up the hard drive to my computer, and after some wiggling (the USB cable didn't want to stay plugged in) started backing up my stuff, starting with the essentials.

USB is slow. I didn't finish backing everything up until Monday morning. My plan had been to wait until the backup was complete, then wait until Alex was down for a nap, and call Apple to make sure I'm still covered with the warranty plan and if they'd set me up to ship the computer back to them for repairs. In the meantime, I got set up to do my computing on our guest computer, figuring that I'd be without the laptop for at least four or five days.

But once the backup had finished, I figured I wasn't losing anything if I played around with it myself. After all, everything was backed up. Why not reformat and reinstall?

So I did, and -- somewhat to my surprise -- it worked. Then I remembered that I still have a firewire cable left over from when I had a firewire iPod, and putting my backed-up files back on the hard drive went much faster. And I spent the rest of Monday fiddling around with it and getting all my applications and settings back where I wanted them. (Including one frustrating problem with iPhoto that finally resolved into not having copied all the actual pictures over that I thought I had, even though the thumbnails were still there. You'd think there would be a cue in the program to tell you when a picture is missing! It would have saved me a few hours of hair-pulling.)

Anyway, it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise -- it cleared my hard drive of a lot of cruft programs that I haven't used in years and years, and got me a nice chunk of hard drive space back.

Now, whether I still have a mechanical failure that's going to cause my hard drive to continue to degrade over the next however long, I'm not sure, so I'll probably be investing in a nice big external hard drive in the near future to use to back everything up.

So that was my Labor Day, pretty much. Whee.

But this morning was Penny's first day of first grade, and that was much happier. Yay! She didn't seem nervous at all, mostly just excited. She found her way to the classroom without any trouble, and after she'd gotten settled at her desk and I'd taken a couple of pictures, gave me hugs and kisses (but didn't try to drag it out, like she sometimes does) and set to work on her first first-grade assignment.


That's my girl.