Just dropped my MacBook Pro off at the Emeryville Apple store. I went by SF yesterday and they couldn’t get it to reboot. It just goes through a black screen with a bunch of white letters and never boots. The tech at the Apple store thought it was the hard drive. Said that they’d probably need to swap out the hard drive and replace it. The MacBook is still under warranty for another month or so, so I guess the timing wasn’t so bad.
I bought something called Disk Warrior for $110 to try and salvage what I could from the Mac’s hard drive. Disk Warrior boots by CD and then I was able to connect a USB external Seagate to the MacBook and copy some of my photos over. I only ever keep 4 or 5 days of unprocessed photos on my MacBook, so I may lose some of those — that I couldn’t recover. I also had 1,000 or so finished but unpublished JPGs for upload to Zooomr. I still have my original RAW files of these images to recreate, but I’m not sure which ones I lost and which ones I didn’t so effectively I may lose some there too. If it’s a really great shot though I can probably go back through my RAW archives (backed up on my Drobo) and reprocess those shots.
I’m most bummed though about the shots I had on there from our Photowalk Friday night. We went down to the train tracks in Oakland to shoot graffiti after watching the movie Piece by Piece at the Oakland Museum of California and I was pretty happy with some of the graffiti and train shots I got. We’ll see what I’m still able to salvage from that shoot when I get my MacBook back.
The tech in Emeryville said that they are going to look at my Mac and get back with me in the next 24 hours to reconfirm the diagnosis of the SF Apple store. He told me that Apple swaps out hard drives in the store, so hopefully it won’t be too long until I get my Mac back up and running.
Probably not as much blogging or photos from me until I get my MacBook back.
I still love Apple by the way and don’t fault them at all for this MacBook failure. Hard drives go out. It’s a fact of life. And for the 11 months that I’ve had the MacBook it’s been an amazing machine, the best computer I’ve ever owned with far fewer problems than I’ve ever had with my PCs.
I also got to see a pretty funny Apple commercial yesterday while waiting for the tech in SF. It was one of the I’m a Mac vs. I’m a PC commercials that I hadn’t seen before and had the Mac huge, round and bloated, as in shipped with a bunch of bloatware that PCs usually are. My brother just bought a Vista Media Center machine and was complaining about this very thing. The commercial was pretty funny.