I was reading Mark Standen's story from yesterday entitled 1.5GHz PowerBook Drives Dropping Like Flies and if it hadn't just happened to me also (yes, seriously) I would have looked at the piece as a story of a couple of coincidental drive failures.

It was the morning of April 19th when my PowerBook locked up and, upon restarting, I got the endless spinning startup Apple. I managed to reset the PMU and get my 1.5GHz Aluminum PowerBook to boot. I was ill equipped to back up at the time and used what I had at hand: Apple's Backup. Not ideal but it did preserve all my data to an external FireWire drive.

I really didn't think the drive was failing. I thought the handle just needed a jiggle but, on the morning of April 20th, the drive officially packed it in. I went to my local authorized Apple Service location and arranged for a drive replacement. By the weekend, the job was done and I went about negotiating with Apple Backup for the release of my preserved data.

I finally got up and running again and made a resolution to be more diligent with my backups and purchased Synchronize Pro X. Backed up every evening like clockwork.... well, for a while anyway. Wait, I'll explain.

The following weekend I recorded an episode of the Spoilers podcast and guested on The Wizards of Technology podcast using the PowerBook and Skype in both cases. Mere hours after wrapping up on Wizards of Tech, a Software Update alerted me to my PowerBook's need to restart.

...that was the last I saw of my desktop. It is now in for its second hard drive replacement in under a month. Thankfully I have full confidence that, once a new drive is installed, SyncPro will bring me back to full productivity in no time.

Contributed by: Rick "RickMacMerc" Yaeger