I’m in the middle of a pickle and won’t be able to easily post any sort of update for a while. My beloved PowerBook is showing signs of a catastrophic hard disk failure. I’m trying to get the user files off with SuperDuper! but it’s not going well. I’m getting I/O consistently.
So, despite not really having the moneys for it, it looks like I will be buying a new MacBook very soon. The ol’ PowerBook is too long in the tooth and has far too many other errors to attempt to repair. I’d march down to the Apple Store right now and pick up a new one but the rumors seem to be building that a line refresh is due on the 14th of this month. It would just kill me if I bought this week only to see an entirely new model come out the next, even with the issues that tend to accompany the first revision of an Apple line.
On top of that, the external drive I own has problems on one of its partitions. As both of our computers are somewhat old and having smallish hard disks I took the 320GB drive I bought when last the PowerBook needed to go in for repair to the Apple Store and split it three ways. Two partitions are for SuperDuper! backups of the iMac and PowerBook hard disks. The third is for storage of things that just aren’t needed all the time and take up a bunch of space: movies, roms, music, etc. Today I’ve found this partition refuses to mount and Disk Utility tells me it has an “Invalid B-Tree Node” which seems to be pretty damned bad. I just can’t justify the purchase of Disk Warrior, no matter how awesome it might be, for these files but as they represent many years worth of acquisition I can’t just leave them either.
Oh, balls!
