Well the day has finally come. After seven years of good use, Lucy, my 15" PowerBook, has finally moved on. Seems her logic board fried. Went to wake her on Friday morning and she awoke with a kernel panic. Rebooted and it showed no Airport Card installed. So I rebooted again and still no Airport Card showing, not even in The System Profiler. My next step was to boot off my clone (I do a cloned back up once a week) and still the problem persists. Jumped on Jen's iMac and went to Apple's Discussion Boards to see if there was any clues to what the hell went wrong. The fact that my clone was pretty much a week older than my boot drive was telling me it was a hardware problem, not something I installed., not to mention that most of the time a kernel panic is a sign of a hardware problem. Not looking good. Booted back into the internal drive and then shut it down and proceeded to reset the PRAM. It never came back on. Bricked. After a brief moment of panic I realized not all is lost. All my music, video and photos live on external drives. So I didn't loose any of that. Only thing on Lucy's internal drive was recent software updated (like Safari 5) and all my registration codes for my software. Took her over the my local Mac Specialist (no Apple Store near here) and he replaced the RAM but still won't boot. He told me he'll hold on to it and call me Monday with the verdict but he was pretty sure it was a bad logic board. So I asked the dumb question: "How much ?" His reply was "A new computer," which is what I thought. But all is not bad. Yeah I lost my trusty companion but I'm not offline. The internal drive is fine and can be removed so my main drive data is intact. In fact, I'll probably remove my Superdrive and put that in a case too.
I took my boot clone and hooked up to Jen's G5 iMac and was able to boot into "my laptop." In fact thats what I'm writing this on now. Somethings were a bit buggy, iTunes was in Spanish for some reason so I turned off all the languages and its fine now (except TV Shows says TV Progammes, go figure.) Had to update my music files as I added music between cloning sessions. Seems iTunes doesn't notice what's in the music library, it goes by the XML file. I'm back to Safari 4 again but I'm not going to upgrade until I get my old drive back. Not saying Safari 5 caused it but I'm a bit paranoid right now.
Now the good news. My images look WAY better on the iMac than my PowerBook. The bigger screen is so much better. This just reinforced my plans of getting the new 27" iMac instead of a MacBook Pro. Just now I won't have a portable. Guess I'll be getting that iPad a bit sooner than I thought (my original plan was to use Lucy as a portable until it became apparent I needed I replacement. Just didn't think it was going to happen this quickly.) Something I have noticed about this iMac. The menubar is gray not transparent. In fact there is no option to turn that on. Didn't realize that my G4 had a better GPU than the iMac. Oh, well. Its really strange when I open a program that was last opened on Lucy and the window, which I had taking up the full screen, is really small on this machine. The resolution is better on the iMac also. Jen's gonna have to beat me with a stick to get back her desktop, fortunately she has a new MacBook she uses all the time anyway.
Lessons learned. First even Macs break sooner or later, although I'd love to know how I managed to fry a logic board. I had noticed that she was beginning to slow down. A lot. Download music on iTunes while updating WebKit and importing photos from my camera and she would bog down to a crawl with the SBOD. Wondering if I just taxed her to point of overheating it. I'll find out Monday. Second lesson learned: backing up. Can't stress enough on this. I have a clone of my internal drive created once a week. I have not one but two back ups of all my photos, music and videos. So I lost none of that, even if they were on my internal drive I'd still have at least one other copy. Third lesson learned: you can boot into your clone drive on other Mac, provided its the same processor (I went from a G4 to a G5. I wouldn't be able to boot onto her MacBook because that's an Intel.) My iPhone has all my contacts, email accounts and Safari bookmarks synced. And all this information along with my Keychain is synced to MobileMe. So in reality al I lost was my laptop, no data. Having gone through this I wouldn't wish this on anyone but honestly I feel I have been prepared for something like this. Even if Lucy's hard drive went I'd still be able to boot up and continue, although that situation would have ended up in a loss of recent data. Gonna start cloning more than once week now. Thanks to all the Mac websites and blogs that I follow as this is where I learned all of this. For all you Mac users (and PC, too) out there who don't have a clue about your machine, you really need to do back ups (I mean Leopard has TimeMachine no excuses here) and make friends with a tech guy or girl. Really.
Thank You Lucy for the last seven years. You weren't my first Mac but you were my favorite.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, PowerBook, IMac, Backing up and cloning hard drives, OS X kernel panics
Posts
