Macbook Repair Advice Please!

Egads. Good luck. Your post reminded me that I hadn't backed up my laptop in quite a while so I just did that.

Mamacita, what happened?
Any luck?

jayce wrote: One recommendation. SpinRite. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm It works on either a mac harddrive or a pc hard drive and does a very low level recovery of drives to get them back up and running. You'd have to pull the drive out and hook it up to someone's PC desktop (will require a cheap adapter, most likely), but I have seen it work on more computers, macs included, than I know what to do with. Its in my repair arsenal all the time. Only met one drive I couldn't recover with it. And that was my own.

That sounds WAY over my head/beyond my abilities -- maybe I can hire you if need be?

Tekserve finally called me back, at least. Said they're still working on it. Sigh.

apollonia666 wrote:
Spilled about a teaspoon of Diet Pepsi into my Powerbook nine days ago. Tekserve has had it for over a week now. They said they'd call me today with an update. They haven't. I left a message for them at 10 this morning asking them to just call and let me know the status, and left another one for them just now. No call.

The amount of Pepsi you spilt may have fried the motherboard, but it's unlikely the hard drive data will have been damaged. HDs are sealed and only really get damaged by severe impact, immersion in liquid or magnetic fields.

If your laptop is fried (which is likely if the power was on when you spilt the drink - sorry!) then you can just have someone extract the hard drive and install it in your new one. It should just boot straight away.

I'm anal about people leaving drinks near laptops. Get into the habit of not doing it!

jayce wrote: One recommendation. SpinRite. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Emphatically seconded.

Recovers disks when all other products fail.

I had a disk with actual physical surface damages from dropping the laptop (yep, spiral scratches basically killed it and it would not even mount, boot or otherwise be recognized), and doing a level 4 SpinRite repair overnight had it booting again and running fine the next day (when I migrated everything off it and pitched it, hah).

Easily the best money I ever spent.

I wouldn't take the time thing as A Sign - it was a holiday weekend, and Tekserve is a busy busy place.
Hope it works out...

Just in case anyone is interested in what ended up happening (not that you SHOULD be!)...

So Tekserve finally called me last week. Turns out my logic board was fried, but at least they were able to save my hard drive. I asked how much a new logic board would cost and it was almost 700 bucks! The tech ended up only charging me for the hour she spent on it (an hour that took them ten days to get around to doing, but whatevs), and for another 70 bucks she put the hard drive in a case so that it's now an external drive. And they're giving the rest of my computer a proper, environmentally-friendly burial.

Then I called a friend to whine about losing my computer and he said, "Oh, hey, my roommate is trying to sell his Mac Mini and flatscreen monitor." So now I have a new (to me, anyway, and it's newer than my Powerbook was) Mac -- not a laptop anymore but at least it doesn't take up as much room as a PC CPU. And since I know the guy he sold it to me super-cheap and is letting me split the payment over two months. And I can just hook my old hard drive up to it and have all my documents and photos and music and so on. It's about as good as things could possibly have turned out, short of my old computer being saved.

While I was annoyed at how godawfully long it took Tekserve to get around to even opening up my Powerbook, I have to say that they were really great to work with once they finally got started on it, and they ended up charging me less than their stated minimum for the labor. A lot of businesses would probably have taken the whole amount, so I thought this was ethical and nice of them.

apollonia666 -- now is a good time to think about how to back up your data. Maybe you can use the Mini's HD for your data and use your old drive (in its enclosure) with Time Machine. Or something.

Does the Mini have enough RAM to run Leopard?

One backup isn't enough. You should have at least 2 backups of your important files, and if you're really paranoid (like me), at least one offsite backup to guard against fire, theft, etc.

Just curious, what do you use for offsite back up?

I signed up (and paid for) unlimited cyber storage from Mozy.com last Aug. I could never ever back up so in the end gave up. Until about a week ago when I tried again. After a week of trying - including contacting support at least twice, I finally backed up my photos and documents (I think). However the primary reason I got it was for my music/movies/iTunes files. I'm now debating whether to see if I can also back these up. It takes sooooooo long - like 14 days! And completely drained my battery (so I had to pay $100+ to get another).

I wonder if Mozy is not the best for Macs. It seems that Time Machine is form OS 10.5 + and I have 10.4...

Suggestions/comments/advice anyone?

Time machine is lovely and has saved us great frustration over the last couple of weeks. It has tons of space (TB) and it's our digital hub--wireless router, storage for large amounts of stuff, moving files between machines, and I think the bf has it doing some other functions. All wireless and connects our entire apartment.

We're mac people and buy whatever the apple stores sells <<j/k I was against getting it but now I love it.

It was great when one of our machines got wiped and we just chose the most recent back-up of and restored it to a few hours before the wipe. Didn't take much effort (physical or mental).

Also, it's on a different circuit which comforts me. My folks (far away from here, in the land of real thunderstorms) loose something to a lightning strike a few times a year but never more than one circuit blows so I like having my stuff separated that way even if it's not likely to happen here.

However you do it, back up your stuff!

My off-site isn't great or high-tech. Things like uploading docs to gdocs, pics to photo warehouse accounts and occasionally leaving discs and harddrives with the most treasured (photos) with a relative. Other than the pictures, my most valuable things are not digital.