For those of you paying attention, I have been having a difficult time with my laptop lately. I think that it is finally starting to buckle under the constant load I put on it. For the past couple of weeks I have been getting frequent “beach ball of death” lag cursors popping up while doing fairly mundane tasks. Sure, the program always comes back to life after a couple of seconds, but it makes the interface feel unbearably sluggish. A while ago I was planning on upgrading the hard drive to a 7200 rpm drive when Snow Leopard came out.
Unfortunately, after clearing out some system caches and various other troubleshooting techniques I noticed that some of my applications started crashing for no apparent reason. This annoyance forced my hand, so I went out and picked up a new drive today, since I am planning on putting a fresh install on it.
I picked up a Seagate Momentus 320gb drive to replace my fujitsu 160gb drive. This was the first time I have ever taken this computer apart. But, I have taken apart Apple laptops before so I knew the entire process was going to be a nightmare. Boy was I right.
I started taking the thing apart with microscopic screw drivers, and it did not take too long before I hit a road block. Apparently, they slipped in a couple of “T6 Torx” screws, just to fuck with you. My Torx screw driver set only went down to T7, so I had to make a trip to the hardware store to pick up another one. The guy there didn’t even know they make Torx screw drivers that small. So, I was left on my own to canvas the “hand tools” isle. Eventually I found what I needed, and of course it cost $6.99.
When I got back at it with the correct tools, things went fine for the most part. I did not the fancy plastic tool for remove the tape and what not, but I found a new play card worked just as well. Eventually, I got the old drive out and the new drive in, then went through the painful task of putting everything back together. And, it only took 4 hours, 28 minutes, and 32 seconds (compare that to the 9 minutes, and 12 seconds it took my to replace the hard drive in my dell laptop a year ago).
Once everything was back in place, I put in my Leopard install disk, and attempted to install the os. No dice, need to “repartition” the disk as “GUID” so I pulled up disk utility and did so, no problem. After that, the installer seemed to go on its merry way. I came back several minutes later to find the install finishing up. Then, just as it was getting ready to reboot this huge error log pops up, accompanied by an alert box stating something to the effect of “OS X unable to complete installation.” Fuck.
After that I went ahead and rebooted the machine, and the cursed setup wizard popped up, so in theory it may have worked. I wade through that piece of shit and get to the desktop so that I can reboot and attempt to install again. This time I flashed the PRAM and NVRAM (just incase some nasties were trapped in there from the previous drive). And now, I am in the process of zeroing out the drive to make sure it is properly writable. When that finishes I’ll attempt the installer again. I’ll post an update after my next round with the vile machine.
UPDATE: It took a little over an hour to zero out the drive, but I assume that helped since I started the installer again, and when I returned my laptop was sitting on the welcome screen. So, it must have installed, and rebooted on its own. And, I assume the errors would have have blocked that.
I went through and installed updates, and most of my apps without an issue. Unfortunately, the Adobe CS4 installed errorred out. I am pretty sure this was just some kind of permissions conflict when I copied over some of the application support files from my previous drive. After running the CS4 cleaner to dump the conflicted files the installed finished successfully.
I didn’t install everything I had on there before, as I don’t really need everything that was on there. So, I’ll try running “lite” and see how it goes for a while.
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