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omggggg I'm never spending an entire week-end reading/installing crucial computer components EVER AGAIN. Not if it means I have to weed through 200 lj posts! (I read most of the personal ones, maybe a quarter of the feeds, no paragraphs over 4 lines long)
Saturday night: stu and I break into my laptop. We also kinda break it. See, there are these two tiny screws on the inside of the battery compartment. Turns out if you don't unscrew them, you break some flaps of metal OFF. So that's what we did. ("why isn't this stupid keyboard coming up?!?!?" Oh, that's why.)
Luckily, they are about the most useless screws we could've done that with (considering how space urgent the MBPs are, space is distinctly at a premium)
After we solved that little mystery we succeeded in getting the keyboard up. I dusted off the ambient light sensors and the Mobo (they were dusty!) and my fans. Then I held my breath and disconnected the hdd from the mobo. This was pretty terrifying as really the only way to manually interface with the hdd is THROUGH A THIN STRIP OF SILICON TRANSMISSION FUN. Or something like that. I was terrified, at any rate.
Luckily the bluetooth transceiver is coated in what looked to be very thick scotch tape, so I could roughhouse it a little, lifted it out of its little cubby hole between the battery compartment and the hdd, pulled the sleep light and some other sensor thing loose from their grip on the hdd, undone two impossible to access screws (and didn't even lose them!) and suddenly, all my data was in my hands.
PROTIP: MBP harddrives may have their little holder thingy VERY SECURELY SCREWED IN. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT STRIP THE SCREWS (they're torx, size 6 I think) LIKE STU DID. YOU WILL BE SAD. or rather, your girlfriend who actually uses the machine will be sad. ("show me your fugee face, sad face :(")
Anyways, after an incident where we thought we might not be able to put in the grommets, they ended up going, and fit, and everything screwed back into place (except the two unfortunate screws, well really just one, but wahtever)
Now the fun part: RESTORING MY DATA YAY. I can't live off an external disk. Okay, I boot off the Leopard dvd, plug in my external enclosure, and restore the disks about a million times trying to get bootcamp to acknowledge that I may in fact partition it (It didn't want a pre-partition, it had to have a certain boot record, etc etc etc) In the end, I gave up and let stu do it while I read Harry Potter (OotP) and while it was restoring yet another time, he watched serenity (I was crying over sirius, myself, looking up from time to time).
Anyways, you get the idea. I still can't boot into windows (unless I want to reinstall that other harddrive. . .) but really, since I'm not doing CAD this semester, I don't need to. I still have everything on disk if I need it. I'm starting to wonder how I should approach this back up thing now that I have more internal space than external space (well, almost). I guess I'll do some thinking about that this week.
In other, non-computer related news, I found a book I've been searching for for roughly. . . well since 2001. Seven years then. (it was december).
Watchers of the Skies.
I read this in 7th grade after I met my AR goals and could read for sheer pleasure. This book taught me a good deal of what I know about astronomy (and it was published forty-five years ago), and much else besides. I am elated to have found it again (there was a copy handy in the library on campus, especially handy because it's always open).
It's just one of those books that you see, scuffy and dark and bleak, and pick up and fall in love with. Or I did, anyways. I'm weird like that. Anyways, I decided to look it up tonight for who knows whatever reason. I think I started thinking about tycho brahe for some reason, or maybe I figured I could find it if I included him in the search. not so. But somehow, I did remember the publishing date, and that went a long way to being able to find it. I had the title completely wrong, and none of the keywords matched, but a subject and publishing year. Wow.
Anyways. Diff E is still pretty complicated, but the solutions manual is alot more helpful than for cal, so I can cypher most of it out. I just need to devote time to studying. *sighs* Same old story, right?
Saturday night: stu and I break into my laptop. We also kinda break it. See, there are these two tiny screws on the inside of the battery compartment. Turns out if you don't unscrew them, you break some flaps of metal OFF. So that's what we did. ("why isn't this stupid keyboard coming up?!?!?" Oh, that's why.)
Luckily, they are about the most useless screws we could've done that with (considering how space urgent the MBPs are, space is distinctly at a premium)
After we solved that little mystery we succeeded in getting the keyboard up. I dusted off the ambient light sensors and the Mobo (they were dusty!) and my fans. Then I held my breath and disconnected the hdd from the mobo. This was pretty terrifying as really the only way to manually interface with the hdd is THROUGH A THIN STRIP OF SILICON TRANSMISSION FUN. Or something like that. I was terrified, at any rate.
Luckily the bluetooth transceiver is coated in what looked to be very thick scotch tape, so I could roughhouse it a little, lifted it out of its little cubby hole between the battery compartment and the hdd, pulled the sleep light and some other sensor thing loose from their grip on the hdd, undone two impossible to access screws (and didn't even lose them!) and suddenly, all my data was in my hands.
PROTIP: MBP harddrives may have their little holder thingy VERY SECURELY SCREWED IN. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT STRIP THE SCREWS (they're torx, size 6 I think) LIKE STU DID. YOU WILL BE SAD. or rather, your girlfriend who actually uses the machine will be sad. ("show me your fugee face, sad face :(")
Anyways, after an incident where we thought we might not be able to put in the grommets, they ended up going, and fit, and everything screwed back into place (except the two unfortunate screws, well really just one, but wahtever)
Now the fun part: RESTORING MY DATA YAY. I can't live off an external disk. Okay, I boot off the Leopard dvd, plug in my external enclosure, and restore the disks about a million times trying to get bootcamp to acknowledge that I may in fact partition it (It didn't want a pre-partition, it had to have a certain boot record, etc etc etc) In the end, I gave up and let stu do it while I read Harry Potter (OotP) and while it was restoring yet another time, he watched serenity (I was crying over sirius, myself, looking up from time to time).
Anyways, you get the idea. I still can't boot into windows (unless I want to reinstall that other harddrive. . .) but really, since I'm not doing CAD this semester, I don't need to. I still have everything on disk if I need it. I'm starting to wonder how I should approach this back up thing now that I have more internal space than external space (well, almost). I guess I'll do some thinking about that this week.
In other, non-computer related news, I found a book I've been searching for for roughly. . . well since 2001. Seven years then. (it was december).
Watchers of the Skies.
I read this in 7th grade after I met my AR goals and could read for sheer pleasure. This book taught me a good deal of what I know about astronomy (and it was published forty-five years ago), and much else besides. I am elated to have found it again (there was a copy handy in the library on campus, especially handy because it's always open).
It's just one of those books that you see, scuffy and dark and bleak, and pick up and fall in love with. Or I did, anyways. I'm weird like that. Anyways, I decided to look it up tonight for who knows whatever reason. I think I started thinking about tycho brahe for some reason, or maybe I figured I could find it if I included him in the search. not so. But somehow, I did remember the publishing date, and that went a long way to being able to find it. I had the title completely wrong, and none of the keywords matched, but a subject and publishing year. Wow.
Anyways. Diff E is still pretty complicated, but the solutions manual is alot more helpful than for cal, so I can cypher most of it out. I just need to devote time to studying. *sighs* Same old story, right?
