I HATE APPLE

clicking sound = probably hard drive death

but it's only FOUR MONTHS OLD. i mean, i believe you, but it's basically brand new and i actually go out of my way not to bother it - i run the bare minimum of basic applications, no fancy downloads or plug-ins or whatever, i never take risks with downloading anything, i always shut it down completely at night, the HD wasn't anywhere near full, so...whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

xp i kept meaning to investigate dropbox, as well as a couple of other options i was told about, but never got round to it :(

i had time machine on that computer but couldn't understand how to get it to work :(

i probably really need to know how best to back up an external HD (which is where all my music is) - is there an online solution for that much data? rather than the unwieldy/expensive route of another external HD?

if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

solid state drives, but they are expensive :(

hard drives don't really die for any particular reason. there's just a non zero chance of them failing from normal use. that chance approaches certainty with enough time, but sometimes people just get unlucky. that's what i mean by saying it's like parking on the hard shoulder.

keep this in mind when figuring out how to back up: one day your hard drive _will_ die. if your backup strategy doesn't work in that situation then it's no use. i've probably lost 1/3 of the hard drives i've owned to failure. the other 2/3 i was lucky enough to get rid of before they failed.

take it to someone though. it might not be the hard drive. quickest way to check is to suggest they boot up in "target disk mode" and see if they can read from the drive (at which point you should immediately backup!).

how much music are we talking lex? 50gb? 500?

that is fucking bullshit lex.

lex have you at least tried booting from a CD? if you can get ahold of a system CD and figure out a way to remove the CD that was already in your computer so that you can stick in the system CD, you can start up and hold down "C" (to make it boot from the CD). from there you can run a few tests to see if your HD really is fucked (tho i am sorry to say it sounds like that's very likely)

time machine works by opening system preferences, going to time machine, specifying an external drive that you want to use as your backup (this obviously requires buying an external drive at least as big as your hard drive) and that's it really.

"sometimes people just get unlucky" is what people said the two times before :(

don't know how much music as external HD not plugged into this borrowed laptop, maybe around 300gb?

i keep thinking, if i hadn't gone for that run, it would have been fine

ya time machine is super easy.

also get dropbox going on. make the dropbox folder be a subfolder of documents and just save all your documents subfolders into it. it is the best easiest instant backup ever.

http://b4.crashplan.com/consumer/index.html

I use this service at home and at work and it's wonderful. Highly recommended. Your HD is fairly easy to replace. Just search for the ifixit.com guide for your model and follow the instructions. There will be a video on youtube showing you how to do it. HD's are very cheap. You can get a 500gb drive for under 100bucks. Go ahead the buy a CrashPlan account and it will backup your machine throughout the day in the background and you'll barely know it's there.

128GB SSDs are about £160 now, still very expensive but they have performance and reliability gains. there's some talk that in the next 6 months you'll be able to get double capacity for current prices, ymmv

i got the cd that was in the drive out!

i'm not really sure what the best thing to do if it is fucked is:

- wait til tomorrow eve for gareth to have a poke around himself (i feel uncomfortable trying out things that people suggest unless it's reasonably simple)
- make "genius" bar appointment for tomorrow daytime to see if they have alternative diagnosis/solution (appalling track record last time though) - it's out of warranty but apparently i should be able to make them do it free
- if HD is fucked, do i give the old one i have lying around a go or get a new one? ugh all of this is going to take so much time, i really don't have this much time to spare at the moment :(

Your HD is fairly easy to replace. Just search for the ifixit.com guide for your model and follow the instructions.

the first time my HD crashed, the apple people actually gave me a new HD and told me to put it in myself, on this basis - it did not work out well at all and made me want to stab people with the screwdriver. ideally i'd be able to do it myself so i can test out the old HD but that experience will just make everything even worse.

Also, if it's clicking it's probably dead but i've had good luck using Data Rescue 3 and also Disk Warrior for hard drive recovery. If your data was worth 100 bucks to you, these applications are pretty good and i'd even say essential to have in cases like this.

What kind of computer is it? Is it one of the white plastic macbooks? If so, it's dead easy to swap HD's.

yeah it's one of the white plastic ones

i'm dreading the hours it will take to reconfigure everything to how i like it once this is all fixed, too :(

recreating your ipod folder out of mammoth itunes is the most tedious thing ever

The swap can be done in under 5 minutes. Use coin to open battery lock and remove battery. use screwdriver to remove 3 screws. pull out that L shaped metal piece. grab drive on side by plastic strip. pull out. use Hex screwdriver to remove metal cover. put metal cover on replacement drive. shove it back in. replace L shaped metal piece. replace 3 screws. replace battery.

iirc "shove it back in" was the stumbling block last time - it wouldn't fit properly and i had to take the whole thing, bits and pieces hanging out everywhere, back to the apple store and beg them to do it

midnight while you're stressed out isn't the right time to try it anyway

there are little black rubber pieces on the side of that drive chamber. if it wasn't going in easily you either had the drive cover on the wrong side or one of those rubber pieces came loose and impeded your progress. if the latter, the apple store most likely fixed it for you. I do this kind of thing at work all the time. You can do it. note the orientation of the drive you pull out and make sure you put the cover back on the new drive the same way it was on the other one. shine a light in that chamber and make sure the rubber pieces aren't loose and blocking. those are the only 2 things that could get in the way. i suppose you may not have tightened the hex screws enough but that should go without saying.

Yeah, that's bullshit, but the clicking definitely sounds like HD death -- nothing else in there can click except the disk eject, and that's working OK.

Depending on how vital the stuff that's on there is you could take the drive to data recovery people, but that's v. expensive. Also worth a try if you're up to it is taking the drive out and putting it in the freezer overnight (in a plastic bag). That will often get it back to life one more time, but it's a one-shot deal -- you need to get your stuff off it fast.

(No comfort, but the four months thing isn't unusual -- hard drives usually either fail really early in their lives, or they chug on forever before dying.)

Totally recommend dropbox for future, too. That and an SSD like cozen says. Super-fast, no moving parts and far more reliable.

also get dropbox going on. make the dropbox folder be a subfolder of documents and just save all your documents subfolders into it. it is the best easiest instant backup ever.

― candid gamera (s1ocki), Thursday, October 28, 2010 6:42 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^THIS^^^^

i use symlinks to add stuff from directories all over home to it, but yeah

what's the point in taking all that care in the first place?

Imo, laptops are made for using. Just be careful not to drop them, be fairly cognizant of obvious malware and such, and back up regularly. Other than that, use the fuck out of it.

i use dropbox, time machine, and until it fell off a table, a hard drive at my parents' place a few hundred miles away.

must have been a 'hard drive' to get to your 'hard drive'

think about how much is that data AND the convenience of being able to work immediately after a fatal hardware problem is worth, and suddenly those external HDs and online backups seem easily worth the money. especially right after it happens and you didn't do anything (this happened to me last year)

stet's right about the HD crash thing, too - my previous internal HD was only about a year old. before that, no hard drive crashes in years and years

yeah geeks have something to describe it - bathtub curve or something?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

anyway that reminds me, my current backup HD is kinda wonky, need to go and buy either a new enclosure for it or a new one altogether

New HD installed. Seems to have sped things up a bit...

I use Time Machine and Super Duper.

I love dropbox but my files are too big to back-up to it.

Hard-drives fail. Generally it's not the computers fault. I will say this, and I've said it before...I have a mac pro and I NEVER turn it off. EVER. I've had it for about 2 years and it's never been off longer then a half hour. Before that I had a G5 that was probably on for 4 years. Back then, I turned it off when I went on vacation during the summer. Came back and the HD crashed on boot. It was physically fine, but had to use Data Rescue and Disk Warrior to get everything off it, format it, then put it back. Then a year later, summer vacation, same thing happened. My theory? With the computer off in a stifling hot room, with no ability for fans to kick in, the heat did something weird. That's my theory at least.

But I have a crazy stupid back-up system now. My main drive has the system and all the apps and this gets backed up via superduper every night. Then I have 2 500gig drives, one is just my music library, the other is just my data, and those get backed up via Time Machine to a 1tb drive. All 5 drives are internal (I'm using the second optical bay for a hard drive).

Not totally smart obviously because there's no offsite back-up. God forbid there's a fire or the computer explodes, I'm fucked. Lately though I've been switching to more cloud computing anyway. Lots of work invoices and other word processing type stuff is on google docs.

Symlinks scare me, but I also don't have a documents folder of any kind. I have a 500 gig drive that's got 200 gigs so far worth of work. So I won't be backing up to the cloud anytime soon.

I recently bought a MacBook Pro for a few reasons and hope to be using it soon at different location. My plan then is to use DropBox to keep it light and backed up/sync'd to the tower. Maybe if I do enough work I'll upgrade to the Pro dropbox. 10 or 20 bucks a month to be able to work on large projects and keep it backed-up and sync'd is a pretty good deal. For reference, the folder for the last Acute CD is over 5 gigs.

been sparsely trying out dropbox but i'd like to start using it more seriously - could people describe their routine and how they combine dropbox with timemachine?

lex have you at least tried booting from a CD? if you can get ahold of a system CD and figure out a way to remove the CD that was already in your computer so that you can stick in the system CD, you can start up and hold down "C" (to make it boot from the CD).

ughhh it won't even boot up from the cd! and now that cd is stuck in there.

Yeah, that's bullshit, but the clicking definitely sounds like HD death -- nothing else in there can click except the disk eject, and that's working OK.

ok: might it be this? because the disc eject isn't working ok. it all started when i left a cd importing, which wouldn't come out - someone on twitter told me to hold down the mouse button while powering up, which got that cd out, but "normal" disk eject definitely not working ok.

make sure you're holding down C as the computer starts up, and keep holding it down. what happens - just a black screen and clicking?

nothing happened for ages - grey screen, cliicking - but it did start up from the disc eventually. then i realised i had no idea what to do next. i fucking hate this shit, i just want the easiest and quickest way of getting everything back how it was and i don't know what to do. i don't know whether to continue trying to diagnose it in case it's not the HD, or try to put in the old HD by myself, or buy a new HD, or take it to the apple genius bar, or take it to a different repair place, i JUST DON'T KNOW and it's stressing me the fuck out because i'm already snowed under and i don't have the time to be going on fruitless missions everywhere.

how come my shitty old pc that i got before i went to university gave me NO PROBLEMS like this in six years, but my macbook has wrecked my life three times in four years?

try the instrux here -

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1417

from the Installer menu choose Disk Utility, click First Aid, and click the triangle next to the hard drive icon to (hopefully!) reveal your ailing HD. then select it and click Repair.

Be a little wary of Dropbox, it doesn't make nice with with Microsoft office Autosave features which can be heartrending as well. Google Docs is a good replacement for most of what you need from Office, though.

lol office

http://www.9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/35-09589b_office2011mac.jpg

ok i had to restart because i pressed "continue" by mistake the first time and didn't get to the right screen

it's not booting from disc at all this time

i've spent an entire morning on this and am no closer to resolving this

i can't even look at the stupid machine - it's on my bed, i literally cannot turn round because if i set my eyes on it I WILL THROW THE CUNT OUT OF A WINDOW

i am this close to actually having a complete breakdown

take it back to apple ffs

but "normal" disk eject definitely not working ok.

If the machine's not booting the only way to make it eject a disk is to hold down the mouse button on startup. It won't eject otherwise -- "normal" doesn't work unless it has started up. If the drive eject works at all then it's not likely to be that making the clicking sound you hear.

If I was you I would buy and fit new SSD, then when things are a bit calmer, get an enclosure for your old drive and see if you can rescue anything off it.

well, we've managed to get the old HD - the one that was mistakenly replaced in may by apple - back in (huge thx to gareth) and it works perfectly! somewhat disconcerting to find every single setting saved exactly as it had been when it crashed five months ago. it'll be a slog reconfiguring it all again, as ever, and i'm still crossing my fingers about data recovery, and of course i have no idea how long this older HD will last, but it could be worse. weird to find myself back in firefox, having gotten used to chrome.

the old HD doesn't have time machine on it so i'll be investigating dropbox tomorrow.

WHY'S MY FUCKING MBP SO SLOW

this is a four GB ram / 2.66 ghz model. it was almost top of the top of the line just three years ago. now what?

i'm just trying to run a safari, pages, mail, itunes and ical at the same time. and newsfire and ichat. and things and omnifocus. i don't even have illustrator and numbers or keynote open.

so why's this thing so fucking slow? is i7 so much better than core 2 duo? is a 3MB L3 cache that much better than an 6MB L2 cache?

― moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, October 26, 2010 8:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

THIS

read on...

"my computer is slow" is the worst possible complaint. What exactly is slow. Safari suffers from Flash and you can help immensely but installing Click to Flash and whitelisting your fav. sites that use Flash. You can't just say your computer is slow. Is it the internet? Is it app switching? Have you opened Activity Monitor and looked at what's going on? Open Terminal and type Top. What's using the most %CPU? Have you run a disk check? How much free HD space do you have? Please provide actual information. There's no reason a machine with 4GB of RAM should be running slow with the apps you've described unless one of them has a memory leak or you're misinterpreting slow internet/flash problems for your whole machine being slow. also, what view are you using for iTunes? if you use CoverFlow it eats a shit ton of RAM. Check Activity Monitor when it 'runs slow' or open Terminal and type 'top' and see what apps are gobbling your bits.

what he said, especially ClickToFlash

Chrome users should install FlashBlock

You totally can just say your computer is slow!

It does seem to happen with Macs of a certain age, too. Whenever I've experienced it, it's been I/O based, not CPU -- almost like it was swapping something fierce.

I can't remember exactly how the on-the-fly defragmentation works in OS X, but there must be some limit to it. Backing up and reinstalling helps a lot, even on SSDs, as OS X doesn't have TRIM support yet.