MacMonday

Okay, so I get to work this morning and the g5 is locked up. It is showing that it's completed it's backup to the LaCie external, but it won't do much except tell me it won't do much. Application not responding, force quit? Sure, except it doesn't.

So I try the power button,and it shuts off, but when I try to bring it back up I get the gray screen with the dark gray apple in the center of it, but not much else. The fans start blowing faster and faster, but nothing useful happens.

I restart again, I unplug and wait, plug back in and restart. I try holding down S, Command+S, Option, Command+P+R, etc, and nothing.

The Apple Store doesn't even open until ten, so I have plenty of time to experiment with different ways to hold my mouth, but to no avail.

The earliest appointment I can get is 12:15. I'm there by 11:45 in case there's a no-show, because without my g5, I can't work. Worse, my boss' laptop, the eMac that's in the other half of the art department and the two PCs that are next to said eMac all depend to a degree on my Mac.



Like all the Mac art files are on my local hard drive, for a start.

I have a LaCie backup drive, which is lucky since when I started this job in February the backup hard drive was dead and I was told I should get it to work sometime when I was caught up.

I couldn't get it back to running (IMHO, Jesus couldn't have resurrected it), but I tried a few times and ultimately bugged my boss to get a new backup drive. I think I'm glad I did.



Except the Genius Bar couldn't quite put Humpty Dumpty back together. They put a new hard drive in to replace the one that failed, no problem, but they couldn't get any data from the old drive. There was an outfit they could send it to for a lot of money and a lot of time...



Speaking of time, when the girl asked me who to ask for in three to five days I must have appeared very much as I did when I went into cardiac arrest mowing Mom's lawn, because she then said, 'Relax, if the part is in stock...'

The trick is, the place that would try to get shit off the hard drive when the Apple Store couldn't, I'd have to leave the heart and brains of my employer at the Apple Store while these vague waters were charted.

So I brought the box back with little other than the OS on it.

Can't get it to see the network, the internet, can't get it to do much.

I found most of the discs I'll need to restore the applications, but that LaCie one-click backup, beware!

I thought it was taking a mirror of my hard drive, and LaCie gives you few options, so I don't know what I could have done differently. But for instance, it saves an 'application' folder, but it doesn't save the applications. At all, it's an empty folder. I'm going to have to bone up on how to make it a RAID, which I think I can do with the software on hand.

So network settings, programs that have a upgrade to an upgrade, etc., it's like not having a backup.



The worst part is, when I left the office today we were not much closer to fixed than when I got there, and I was backed up at the end of last week.

Sucks to be me...