A simple plan

Posted on by Dale

That’s what it was, a simple plan.

I had ordered a new 500GB hard drive for my laptop, since I’m down to less that 5GB remaining space on my original hard drive. It came on Wednesday. All I had to do was:

  1. Install Mac OS X on the new drive.
  2. Migrate all my files to the new drive.
  3. Test boot the new drive
  4. Switch the old and new drives.

I’ll start the process on Friday, the start of the holiday weekend, plenty of time to do a pretty long task. So I go to One World Computing’s website to look at the video about installing the hard drive. Not even scary, but I realized I didn’t have any of the tools required. Should have watched the video first, I suppose, and then I could have ordered the 11-piece toolkit.

Not a problem, other than OWC not having it in stock. I order it from another company, and it arrives on Saturday. Fine, I’ll start this on Sunday.

Only I can’t find my Leopard install disk. I think it’s at school, where I’ve been trying to figure out how to install OS X on an old blue-and-white G3 that doesn’t have an internal DVD drive and doesn’t want to boot off an external drive.

Not a problem. I ask Marc to load me his install disk. He brings it to me this morning, Monday.

Only my DVD drive isn’t functioning. It’s been wonky its whole life, but now it’s failing utterly to read disks. I should have known this last weekend when I planned to play a new HD music DVD for the Lichtenbergians, but the computer kept rejecting the disk. Hm, bad disk, I thought. Nope: bad drive.

So now I have an appointment at the Genius Bar at Lenox Mall on Tuesday, 5:00 pm. My AppleCare plan is still in force, so perhaps they can just switch one out right there on the spot. Perhaps.

Arrgh.

And after spreading all that wheat straw on the labyrinth yesterday, my allergies have kicked in full force. I am miserable. Poor me, all round. I’m blaming Glenn Beck. And James Inhofe.

10 thoughts on “A simple plan”

  1. Today (Tuesday) I find that my Leopard disk is not at school; my Tiger (10.4) disk is, but not Leopard. Who knows where it is?

  2. You should also blame Jesse Jackson. He’s probably guilty of something, if not this. Besides, if they decide to form a “People Blamed by Dale Lyles” support group, his involvement would make the meetings more interesting.

  3. I’m at the Apple Store in Lenox Mall, and not only does the SuperDrive work just fine, the blog is quite snappy. What’s going on here?

  4. All right, it’s Wednesday morning. I have installed Mac OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, on my new 500GB drive , and I am running my computer from said drive, still external. Apparently Photoshop CS2, which is ancient, runs just fine. So now all I have to do is swap the drives, which I’ll do today during some of my work time at school.

    It’s very odd, and very liberating, to see more free space on my hard drive, even after transferring ≈160GB of stuff, than I’ve ever owned in toto on any previous drive.

  5. Jesse Jackson? Has he said something incredibly mendacious in the last week, poisoning the public discourse in ways that make me fear for the Republic? I must have missed it.

  6. Wednesday, lunch: the new hard drive is installed. This little laptop now has had a new battery, new memory, and now a new hard drive installed. Wonder if I could get a new logic board?

    Is this what it was like for those poor PC folk back in the day?

  7. If he hasn’t said something ridiculous and inflammatory in the last month then he is overdue for his cycle. Besides, as I said, I like the idea of watching he and Beck trying to put together an agenda.

  9. “When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.” -JJ

    See? Anyone that believes you have to be sober to walk through the doors of opportunity isn’t thinking it through.

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