A series of unfortunate events

The past three days have seen a steady descent from my laptop working, to it being a very attractive paper weight.

Sunday night immediately after blogging, it crashed, and rebooted with the desktop background corrupted, meaning that the hard drive was failing. After that there was an ill-fated (involving a ruler and a pair of scissors) attempt to get the back cover off to remove the hard drive. However this really only left me with a scratch on the underside.

Yesterday I turned up to the apple store on campus and asked to borrow some screw drivers to take the hard drive out. Much to my surprise, they obliged! With that the corrupted hard drive was removed from the laptop. However, they didn't have a spare anti-static bag, so I carried the hard drive from the quad, to K17, and all the way back up to Perouse Lodge. That night I came up with an elaborate scheme to fix my laptop, and the rest of the data off my hard drive. All I had to do was back up the data on my external hard drive, take the hard drive out of that, put that in my laptop, and put the laptop hard drive in the external case. Simple right? Trouble was that external hard drive case didn't have screws... I got the hard drive out of it though, but let's just say that it has more of an open air design now.

Today during our free afternoon I returned to the apple store, both hard drives in hand. Asked nicely and was allowed to borrow screw drivers again (They're very nice people there). So now with hard drives exchanged, I was told that it would be another day before they would get OS X install disks in. Next stop on my adventure was K17 (The computer science building) where they happened to have install disks for Ubuntu 9.10! The big problem I had then was I tried installing that operating system on battery power, since I left the charger up in Perouse Lodge. The install finished before running out of power, the only thing was it refused to boot from the hard drive... and now the ubuntu cd is corrupted...

I promise I program better than I break stuff.

Syndicated on my blog.