What a way to start working in the new year!  Apparently my MacBook’s hard drive just up and died on me on the night of Jan. 3rd.  I thought it was a simple software glitch (I was using the Google Chrome beta for Mac… thought hit a nasty bug) but upon trying to troubleshoot, I discovered that my computer just couldn’t find its internal hard drive no matter what I tried.  They included:

• Resetting PRAM
• Holding down option key when powering up (startup chooser)
• Holding down shift key when powering up (safe startup)
• Booting from a Mac OS X install disc and running disk utility (can’t find the hard drive)
• Running fsck (comand-line disk utility tool) from the terminal loaded from the install disc

So I went out to a local Best Buy and bought a Seagate 250GB 2.5″ SATA hard drive.  It says that it’s compatible with MacBook on the box, which gave me comfort.

One more hurdle:  replacing the MacBook’s hard drive requires a Torx screwdriver (it’s like a 6-prong star shape) of size T8 (which is pretty small).  I had never seen that before, so a trip to Ace Hardware and $16 was required to remedy that.

Fortunately, I had finally upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard a few months ago — so Time Machine backup had been kept.  I couldn’t restore the backup without installing OS first, but upon getting the OS loaded, it gave me an option to restore a Time Machine backup.

And restore, it did — pretty much every setting on my machine was restored, everything from FireFox extensions to Dock settings.  Phew!

There were some glitches, though.  Config files for the Apache web server included in Mac OS weren’t saved, so I had to rebuild those.  If you are a web developer using a Mac, I recommend you manually backup those httpd.conf files.

All in all, it took one work day and about $100 to recover from a hard drive failure.  It’s not bad, it could have been a lot worse….

I am certain that this is not an indication of how my year is going to go!  ;-)