My purse no longer contains a sleek black laptop. I write this as I grudgingly stare at my PowerBook. Earlier today, while chatting inside my Parallels instance, my Macbook stopped responding, save for the mouse, and I heard some scratching going on below my right hand. No, this wasn’t the normal geiger-counter sound of a healthy hard disk, this was the click of death. A long scratching sound followed by a clicking made my heart sink. Much like my backup drive failing before, I knew I was doomed… but this time… it was much worse.

I quickly left work and picked up a firewire drive. I was able to boot my Macbook and grab my entire home directory, approximatgely 22GB. Happily, that part of the drive was still accessible. With data safely stored, I ran a Disk Utility, and three hours of node errors and the dreaded scratch and click… it was high time that I headed on over to the Apple Store. The Apple concierge service, said that the Somerset store was experiencing high customer volumes, so I was unable to get an appointment to see a “Genius”. I took the chance and drove on over to see if I could just drop my Macbook off to be diagnosed in the morning. After waiting patiently for scores of minor iPod issues and a guy with a dirty keyboard, I was able to get get a hold of a “Genius” ten minutes before the store closed. The first lines of dialogue with the “Genius” keyed him in that I wasn’t just another vapid computer user, and we were able to quickly come to the conclusion that the drive needed to be replaced. The repair is quick (it’s just a few screws) but I was told three to five business days to get the part in. For now… I’m back to lugging around my PowerBook.