tales from a reluctant tech

the story you are about to read is real. only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

noon saturday: i’m chatting online with my friend “tiffany.” i tell tiffany that i had a dream that i helped her upgrade her operating system to tiger. she says that maybe it’s a sign that it’s time to actually do it. you see, tiffany is still using os 9, five years after os x was released. tiffany actually purchased adobe creative suite, which will only work with os x, two years ago… but has yet to install os x. tiffany is a wee bit apprehensive about change.

12:15: i throw some stuff together, head out of the house, drive to plano, drop by the bank, and arrive at tiffany’s house with tiger in hand. i estimate that we’ll be done with the installation and file transfer and setup process by early evening, if not sooner.

1 p.m.: tiffany and i go out to get some lunch, where she promptly sees someone she knows. no big surprise here. what makes it even funnier is that we are the only other people in the restaurant besides this person.

2 p.m.: we arrive back at tiffany’s house. her internal hard drive is making an occasional crunchy grinding sound. her brand new lacie external hard drive is acting flaky. i think she needs a new power supply/cord for the lacie. we manage to get most of her files backed up onto it, and the rest onto her ipod. i begin installing tiger.

2:30 p.m.: we leave tiger installing and trek across the molten pavement to tiffany’s apartment pool. no one else is swimming on this boiling hot saturday afternoon. a couple of people are reading in lounge chairs under the crepe myrtle trees. creepy guy “chester” is not at the pool today — he’s usually out in a lounge chair in his shorts, ickily staring at any woman in the vicinity. five minutes after we get in, chester shows up and slowly walks through the pool area, but continues into the workout center. we swim for an hour. just as we get out and wrap up in our towels, chester finishes his workout and comes back to the pool area. good timing on our part today.

4:00 p.m.: back at the apartment, tiger has finished installing and the computer is waiting for us with a setup screen. the hard drive is making that grinding noise, now rhythmically. i start entering the setup information and… nothing. i figure that it’s just taking a few minutes to respond, and wait it out. five minutes later, what i typed appears in the first blank. i click to the next blank and start typing… and nothing. i have a sinking feeling. five more minutes go by, and my typing suddenly appears in the blank. that sinking feeling sinks even lower.

4:30 p.m.: i decide that the best course of action is to simply reboot and hope that whatever little trauma the computer is suffering will clear up. i restart, we get the fun little “welcome” animation, and the setup screen appears again. i type, this time successfully. on screen 4, the hard drive starts bleating again and things grind to a halt. i get the spinning beach ball of death. my patience with this lasts until screen 6. i restart again.

5:00 p.m.: i try everything that i can think of to cancel out of the setup program, thinking that maybe there is something wrong with it. nothing works. i start typing on setup screen one, and almost immediately we go into the crunchy grind beach ball routine. tiffany freaks out about how she KNEW that change was a bad idea, and that she KNEW that os x would kill her computer. i assure her that it’s not os x’s fault; it’s her flaky ancient hard drive crapping out on her.

5:15 p.m.: i restart using the os x install cd. i run disk repair. it finds nothing wrong with the disk. i restart using the diskwarrior cd. it also finds nothing wrong with the disk. i find this strange since this disk has likely never been repaired, de-fragged, or had routine maintenance performed on it.

6:00 p.m.: after numerous reboots and a consistent hard disk failure about 120 seconds after startup, i realize that the disk is probably just not going to work. i consult my magic 8-ball (thanks, honey!) and decide to go purchase a new internal hard drive. tiffany and i go to fry’s and snag a seagate 120MB hard drive.

6:30 p.m.: we put the new hard drive in the computer, boot up using the os x install cd, and it doesn’t see the new hard drive. this is, of course, because it has not been initialized. i restart using the os 9.0.4 system cds that came with the computer. i initialize the new hard drive. i restart using the tiger install cd, and begin installing it on the new hard drive.

7:30 p.m.: we leave tiger installing on the hard drive (sound familiar?) and go pick up doc to go to dinner. we meet stan at cafe express, where tiffany buys me dinner as thanks. i haven’t seen stan in months. he’s totally unrestrained at dinner and he and doc make me laugh a lot.

10:30 p.m.: we drop doc off at home and tiffany and i drive back to her apartment. tiger has successfully installed, but we are frozen once again on the setup screen. i can hear her old hard drive crunching and grinding rhythmically. i shut down, unplug the power and data cables from the old hard drive, and restart again. this time it works flawlessly. i get through setup, get tiffany connected to the internet, and copy her files from her ipod and the lacie external, which seems to be working just fine under os x.

midnight: just for the hell of it, we try restarting again with the old hard drive connected. even though we’re booting from the new drive, the mere presence of the old drive brings the system to a halt.

12:30 a.m.: we decide to go to the apple store at lunch one day during the week and ask the geniuses about the best course of action for getting started up successfully from the old hard drive so we can make sure we have all her data and programs off of it. i’m exhausted and need to go to bed. at 12:45, i drive home.

we have yet to deal with getting her stuff off the old drive, or even installing new programs on the new drive and getting all her email transferred over, but thanks to the apple geniuses, we now have a course of action. that will be another tale, for another day.