After a lengthy paternity leave and a very pleasant Christmas with my family, I sat down at my desk at work for the first time for over two weeks on Tuesday. I was halfheartedly working on a horrendously written, mind-numbingly repetitive manuscript that I'd been picking away at for the past week between diapers, naps and all of the other stuff that comes with being a new parent, but it's such a splendiferous piece of crap that at times I felt myself wishing the Bean would release her own splendiferous piece of crap so I could get my mind off it.
At any rate, my work machine somehow managed to rebel against this garbage in a way that my enfeebled mind could not, and choked about two hours into the workday. A hard crash that left me with the Spinning Beach Ball of Doom, which forced me to shut down by pressing and holding the power button. Never a good sign, but possibly brought on by two weeks of mostly idleness on my computer's part (I left it on in case my co-workers needed to access anything on it while I was away). This had never been a problem before, and for a 17-month-old computer, I wasn't expecting it to be one. But for whatever reason, it just wouldn't start up again. I got the dreaded flashing question mark, which means the hard drive/operating system couldn't even be found.
I left the machine off and alone for an hour, came back, fired it up, and it worked fine - for about a half hour, when it hard-crashed again. This time, nothing I could do would resurrect it. DiskWarrior, single-user mode, Disk Utility, target mode in FireWire - all of them failed quite roundly. I loaded the hard drive into another tower, tried all manner of recovery tools on it there, and met with nothing but failure. Having wasted a day and a half trying to recover the hard drive, I was on the verge of giving up and taking the thing in to the Apple Store's Genius Bar. I had resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably lost the drive and all of its contents - most of which had been mirrored to the local server, but some of which I only had locally, including (most importantly) a gigabyte or two of work-related email. (Special shit list mention to Microsoft for making Entourage messages very difficult to export en masse to another program, though I pretty much top my own shit list for not having made my own backup in the first place.)
But then a ray of sunshine - a friend recommended something rather wacky, one of those off-the-wall, what-else-do-I-have-to-lose solutions that sounds so crazy it just might work. If your machine's freezing, get it back...by freezing it! Well, more specifically, the hard drive. Apparently by lowering its temperature, you either contract some of the metal parts that had enlarged due to overheating, or you restore the magnetic field in the drive's platters somehow, or maybe the extreme cold wakes up the magical little Maxtor elves that live inside the thing and jump-starts them to start working. Either way, I've now spent the past day with my hard drive in the freezer for a half-hour at a time, and in my computer for ten minutes at a time (at which point it conks out again). I've managed to extract my entire Applications and Documents folders, and I'm halfway through the Library...so signs point in the right direction, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed nonetheless...
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