Well, it had to happen sooner or later...

[viktor_haag]

My up-to-this-point-rock-solid-reliable G5 at work this morning evidenced hardware weirdness which falls solidly into the not good at all behaviour.

I got blithely informed today by TimeMachine that it hadn't done a backup in 10 days. I took this with a big dose of salt, but went digging. It appears that my external HDD had become invisible to my desktop. The HDD being less than two years old, this set off all sorts of warning bells in my head.

After blowing my entire morning with some finicky cross checking with my laptop, and a newly purchased (ouch) external HDD, it appears that the FireWire bus on my desktop may be No Longer Functional™.

Luckily, the drive is "only" a TimeMachine backup drive, so all my primary data is sitting, still, on the internal HDDs in the computer.

But now I'm two hundred bucks lighter, having bought a new backup drive, and I'm also receiving warning signs of the impending mortality of my reliable work computer. A problem with the FireWire bus could very well signify impending motherboard badness, and that would be a sad state of affairs indeed.

And I've been unable to locate the receipt for the old HDD, so despite it being still within the warranty period.... grrrr...

Having just req'd a new laptop (non-Mac) from my employer, I suspect that, should my desktop die within the next year, I will be rather gently informed that my computing budget has already been spent, and I won't be getting a replacement desktop... and that means for the first time in almost a decade, I'll be back in Windows land at work (aiiieeee).

Please, spirit-of-macintosh, keep my desktop alive long enough for me to req your replacement when you finally kick over! Please!

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Sorry about hearing of your (Mac) computer woes!

::B::

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that, when it comes time to replace my desktop, I'll be able to req a mac mini; their relatively low cost (especially since I've already got all the peripherals I need) might make the move palatable. That was what I did when my home desktop's motherboard exploded, and I've had precious few complaints with the value for the money (so far, at least).