I don’t know how this can happen. But the laptop was dead dead. Not just dead, but double dead. The drive did not mount when I tested it here. The disk first aid failed. The grey screen of death had descended.
But then, miraculously when I turned it on at the Apple Store – the screen briefly flickered to life. My hopes restored, I actually shouted “what the fucl?” before calming down only to then see the grey screen return and the machine crash once more. I was talking to the guy at the Genius Bar (can’t believe I did not get his name) and he was trying to connect the hard drive to his laptop to run Disk Warrior, but it just would not even show up. My hopes sank again.
Then the guy said “wait, let me check something”. He took the error code I posted on my blog earlier and found some serious FU based on my mention of the trick the guy did in Miami last time with regards to squeezing the base of the left palm rest. As I sat utterly devastated that a respite was so short lived, he read something about a cable, applied the FU and the iBook restarted once again, but this time it stayed live. I spent the next hour or so backing up everything to my 20GB iPod.
So now I have rebuilt the email database, working on the photos and I am back in business – a little further behind where I would like to be at the moment, but moving again and settling in. The iBook is flying off to wherever they go to repair them and hopefully it will be back next week. All nice and new and ready to go up for sale on eBay to help offset the costs of getting a new MacBook. I hope they at least replace it with a new drive this time instead of a refubished one. More on that in the days to come.
