First came the freeze.
No warning, no previous failures, no noise, nothing that could have warned me about it. In fact, I have a small app running continuously on the background checking the disk via S.M.A.R.T. and it never said a thing.
Nevertheless… it froze. Weird. But then I was just setting up a iSight camera for the first time so the thought was pretty obvious “What, firewire crashes? USB I’m used to but firewire? Come on!”
Then came the hard reboot. Ssh’ing into the machine was impossible so it was finger on the button for a while until it powered down.
And, finally, understanding dawned. It wouldn’t boot. It would just sit there making all those clunking noises and then give up and show me the icon for “so where’s my disk then?”
Yup, for all my efforts up until now it seems that my trusty old lemming (the iBook) is in dire need of a new hard drive. The last desperate attempt will be latter today at home, but I’m not holding my breath.
Sniff!