Oh nooooes!!!

Soooo....

I didn't stop posting because of lack of motivation. At the beginning of last week, this happened:


I tried running a fsck in single-user mode first when I couldn't even get a login screen or boot in safe mode (I know just enough about Macs to troubleshoot beyond unplugging all my peripherals rebooting). I was getting the little chime and a happy Apple logo, it was just hanging at the blue screen, never giving the white login box. 

I used the original install disc that came with my iMac. I got the same error through Disk Utility (invalid index key). So I got a copy of Disk Warrior's boot DVD to try and repair it that way. It could look at all the data on the drive, but said the drive had sustained physical damage and could not rebuild the directory. It couldn't even let me get to the files on the drive so I could scoop them up and put what would fit on the external drive.

Then this happened:


If you're not sure what that is, it's an unhappy Mac. No chime at start up, no nothing. It couldn't find the hard drive. Like it wasn't even in the machine. 

When you don't have an external hard drive big enough to handle backing up your computer, you lose a lot. Unfortunately, I lost a lot.

I only post about 1/4 of Ian's baby photos on Facebook. I don't like to inundate everyone with hundreds of photos of the same thing every day, so I was downloading them all to the computer, but only posting the best ones. I still have the "best of the best," but there were a few I hadn't edited and posted yet.

I lost all my Etsy shop photos and photos I was going to edit to list new items.

My software was all for Mac. I'm not paying $800 for PC versions of them now. I can't, really. Starving artist in this town means what I make has to go feed the baby first, then goes back into the business. Some might say that's stupid or irresponsible, but if I 'invest' in a bigger external drive or another software key to install on my PC, then I'm left with a hungry baby. I can find other ways to replace my software, but not at the expense of my baby. So it looks like I'm not going to be a graphic designer much in the near (or far) future.

Half my music collection (including most of my eMusic files) were on the computer, not the tiny external I was using for music and old portfolio files. And eMusic wants me to pay for files I've already paid for to download them to another computer.

My brother-in-law is going to see if he can recover any of the date on the hard drive. It could be one of the 'swelling/leaking capacitors' the G5 iMacs that came out at that time were famous for. That could mimic a hard drive failure. Or something more simple like a connector (I've read a lot about my model iMac and apparently it had a lot of physical issues that mimicked hard drive failure -- I'm praying it's one of those things and not that my HD took a total piss on my livelihood). While I can do software tricks, I'm terrible at taking machines apart and putting them back together and have them still work, so I'm having to learn how to let go of a major project and trust someone else. It's easier to do that when I know I'm letting a genius work on my Mac. I wouldn't trust anyone else right now.

I am lucky enough to have a second computer, a nice PC, but I do miss my Mac. It was just more... intuitive. Artistic. Quieter. Sleeker. More... me.




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1 comment:

  1. Computer problems suck!!! I need a new one really soon. I want a Mac but it isn't very likely I will ever get one so I'd totally settle for a nice decent laptop. Not sure I'll get that either LOL.

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