Last week my 17 inch Macbook Pro crashed while I was using it so I force-powered if off and finished the nights work on my desktop PC. The next day I powered up the Macbook and after a prolonged Apple screen, would receive only a blinking question mark every time a reboot was attempted…

Took it to the Apple store. The “Mac Genius” (I use quotations as a double meaning since its the phrase Apple describes the position themselves, but also that I am skeptical of the validity of the title – both of which can be represented by quotes and would be ambiguous to the reader on which I was trying to convey if I didn’t just tell you “both”. man, I’m awesome) said the hard drive is broken and I need a new one. So I bought one from a local computer store and started to dissect the computer to install it. I did… and stared at it awhile… thinking of all the gorgeous pictures of myself and the time spent editing the 5 or 6 videos on the old hard drive that would be lost forever.

(this is actually just some random person’s picture on photobucket cuz I was too lazy to take a picture and upload it myself cuz its so many extra steps to do it on the PC. my open mac and the new/old hard drive look exactly like this though, so whatever. screw you guys)

The data recovery place that Apple recommended I go to if I wanted to save the info from the busted drive gave me an estimate of $500 to $3,500 before I told him to die and hung up on him (or politely said “okay, thank you so much for the info, have a great day, goodbye”. whatever). But I couldn’t just leave the stuff on there only to be recovered years later when I could afford the time, energy and cost.

So I unhooked the new hard drive and put the old one back in. Tried a few things I found on Google. No use. Got a tip on a software fix, since the hard drive was clearly not physically broken as I found out through other tests I did and went to Apple to buy it. Upon checkout my card was declined. I remembered my current balance and totally lied to the guy and said to give me a minute to call my bank and get the issue resolved. Instead, I bolted out of the mall and back into my car and deposited some checks into my account at my bank 5 miles down the road and zipped right back to the mall in under 5 minutes and told the same guy to try the card again. When it worked he was surprised and asked what the problem was. I blamed it on my exorbitant and luxurious travels abroad for business and pleasure and the bank just has a sensitive “suspicion of lost or stolen card” policy. He was very impressed. And I was very a liar.

I brought the software home. Data Rescue 2. It came with no directions. Just a CD in a box. Ok… I start running it. It goes great for about 20 minutes. Stops the scan at 60 gigabytes. Freezes for about 40 minutes. I call the software makers. They say when it reaches a corrupt cluster it could take a few hours. I say okay, just wanted to see how to proceed – but also, just as a side note – this “estimated time remaining” number isn’t accurate…right? Because it keeps bouncing around from thousands to several thousands of hours. The guy says no, it could in fact be accurate and that he’s heard of drives scanning for up to a month, but that the people do indeed get their data afterward.

Dammit…

That was last week..
So far the scan is up to 75.5gb on a 150gb hard drive, making the progress till now a consistent 2gb per day.

So… continuing at this pace.
with 75gb to go..
at 2gb a day.
2 into 75 is….
37.5 days…

Dammit…