LCARS
Well-known member
My pandemic-find minty 12" PowerBook has been full of surprises. Functional batteries, one at 88% capacity the other at 94%, no shiny keys, and a healthy original hard drive. Well the later changed tonight before my eyes and I blame the GDR! (More on that later).
Because it has functional batteries that can go for several hours, I've been using this at my favorite cafe almost daily. Its been fantastic; I can do light research, write, check the news, and stream music on a 21 year old PowerBook. A sudden burst of interest in reading about East Germany prompted maybe the longest stretch of continuous use yet (a few hours of Wikipedia) and that's when things started to go wrong. It was also on the heels of about two earlier hours of writing.
Out of character for the machine, the fans came on and the spaces above & below the HDD were oddly warm. That was followed by an unhappy mechanical sound and beyond sluggish interface. Force quit would not respond and I eventually had to press the button and force it off. After cooling I rebooted and it never quite made it. It took about 5 minutes to go from the Apple logo screen to the OS X screen and the blue progress bar never materialized. The mechanical noises continued and I decided to shut it off and ask for advice.
I do have several Word files that I would like to save and are, well, not backed up
. Would the collective 'you' try again to boot and then backup the file? Or send the drive off for recovery? If its failing to reach the desktop (I assume, I didn't want to give it tens and tens of minutes to accomplish something that should be quicker) would that indicate a failure mode that could ruin the platters?
I'm amazed that it failed so suddenly. There were no obvious issues prior to this, at least not that I recognized. Sigh, still, 21 years is impressive for the HDD.
Because it has functional batteries that can go for several hours, I've been using this at my favorite cafe almost daily. Its been fantastic; I can do light research, write, check the news, and stream music on a 21 year old PowerBook. A sudden burst of interest in reading about East Germany prompted maybe the longest stretch of continuous use yet (a few hours of Wikipedia) and that's when things started to go wrong. It was also on the heels of about two earlier hours of writing.
Out of character for the machine, the fans came on and the spaces above & below the HDD were oddly warm. That was followed by an unhappy mechanical sound and beyond sluggish interface. Force quit would not respond and I eventually had to press the button and force it off. After cooling I rebooted and it never quite made it. It took about 5 minutes to go from the Apple logo screen to the OS X screen and the blue progress bar never materialized. The mechanical noises continued and I decided to shut it off and ask for advice.
I do have several Word files that I would like to save and are, well, not backed up
. Would the collective 'you' try again to boot and then backup the file? Or send the drive off for recovery? If its failing to reach the desktop (I assume, I didn't want to give it tens and tens of minutes to accomplish something that should be quicker) would that indicate a failure mode that could ruin the platters?I'm amazed that it failed so suddenly. There were no obvious issues prior to this, at least not that I recognized. Sigh, still, 21 years is impressive for the HDD.
