\jeff{krimmel}

Four Miles and A New iBook Hard Drive

Yesterday was a big day on two fronts for me. First, I ran four miles in the morning. I had never done that before. I had gotten quite comfortable running three miles at a time. But that one additional mile seemed like it would be so much more difficult than the first three. I finally made the jump, and it turned out just fine. It’s not like I was feeling fresh or light on my feet at the end, but I ran it without stopping, and I ran it in under forty minutes (38:36, to be exact). Not too shabby, if I may say so myself.

The other big news was that I finally upgraded the hard drive in my iBook G4. I bought my iBook a year ago, and it’s 30 GB hard drive did fine for me in the beginning. But as soon as I wanted to put Matlab, Mathematica, and an office suite on top of my music and photos, I ran out of room. I went to NewEgg and bought a 120 GB Western Digital hard drive (the WD1200VE) for $100. I followed the directions at faqintosh, and I was good to go after a fair bit of effort.

I actually disassembled and reassembled my iBook four times before I get everything working, and I only have my ignorance of OS X to blame. When I first put the new hard drive in, I booted with the OS X installation CD, but when it asked for a destination volume, it gave me no options. I thought it wasn’t seeing my new drive. So I disassembled the iBook, checked the connections, reassembled it, and tried again. No destination volumes were listed. I disassembled, swapped back to the old hard drive, reassembled, and everything came up roses. Thus I knew the problem was either with the new hard drive itself or with what I was doing in OS X.

Sure enough, after some web searching, I realized I had to use the Disk Utility to create a partition on the new drive. After another diassemble and reassemble, I used the Disk Utility, and I finally had a suitable destination volume available. I restored OS X from a backup I had made on an external hard drive, and the rest of the process was easy as cake. My laptop looked and felt exactly the way I had left it when I performed my final backup before switching drives. Needless to say I was very happy.

I might also mention that I use SuperDuper! for my backups, and it is just awesome. I paid to register it, and I thus have access to a couple of really nice features, like the Smart Update. When I create backups now, only the difference between the laptop and the old backup is copied over, which cuts the time commitment for making backups way down. As a result, I am able to keep up-to-date backups that are fully compatible with OS X’s restore functionality.

And now I won’t have to worry about storage space on my laptop for some time to come, I hope.