The Hitachi TravelStar hard disk in my trusty lucite swathed backup drive made some sad clanking noises when I plugged it into my PowerBook this morning. My heart skipped a few beats, a sinking feeling of dread, and I felt that queasy diarrhea mambo going on in my colon.

It was amazing to recall all the things that were quickly being taken from me, platter by patter, rendered inaccessible from the sound of the read-head. Footage shot in the Philippines on the drive was backed up to DVD, but I haven’t tested restoring from those disks. An installation of Mac OS X Panther and the last breaths of my old iBook were stored as well. Finally, a rare copy of an episode of ‘The Family Guy’ (released prior to September 2001) where a known enemy combatant of the United States gets through security by means of singing a show tune was on the drive.

-Spinning rainbow beach ball… tormenting me… spinning towards oblivion.
-option apple esc
-Relaunch Finder
-I think the drive stop choking!
-Finder isn’t responding!
-I open a terminal and issue a reboot, an init 6, and a shutdown, the GUI doesn’t relent…
-I power down
-I bring my powerbook back up. The drive is still fully powered and doesn’t need to lug its way through spinup.

The desktop started, and the drive wasn’t mounted. Disc Utility saw the drive and its mount point. The drive passed a Verify, then a Repair. I hit the expose keystroke to see the desktop, and Hallelujah. Back to procrastinating and taking the availability of my main hard disk for granted.