Well, I'd love to report on how much I'm loving Tiger right now. Except that I've spent the last 36 hours trying to revive a dead hard drive. Ironically, the hard drive collapsed just as I was trying to perform a full backup onto my spiffy new LaCie external hard drive. But really, Finder has been dry heaving for a couple of weeks now, which was why I wanted to do the backup and then a clean install of Tiger.
After the photography class lecture this morning, I bunked off to the Apple Store for a chat with the guys at the Genius Bar. I thought I'd end up buying a copy of DiskWarrior, though that was a purchase I was hoping to delay, if at all possible. Instead of queueing up for the Genius Bar, you now go to one of the display Macs and sign in. Even with the signing-in, I had about an hour's wait...absolute torture for those of us who were born without the waiting gene. However, it's no-charge diagnostics and support, so I'm not going to complain.
I had lots of time to look at iPods and hope that I could get away with
not buying DiskWarrior today and get an iPod instead (sometimes my dreams are all I have in this world...) because I like the idea of being able to synch the iPod to iCal and my address book, as well as having tunes for my walks. It amazed me how iPods were flying out of the store! It was busy while I was in there, and it seemed like every other customer was purchasing some kind of iPod. I think there were more iPods being bought than there were copies of Tiger. Incredible!
My turn finally came up and the Genius at the bar pointed to the DiskWarrior box in my hand and said, "You need this program." He confirmed that it was a directory structure error (think of a card catalog in a library where the ink gets smudged on some or all of the cards--or they're in a completely random order--and you can no longer use it to find the books). He said it's also good for maintaining the system in order to prevent Jaguar (soon to be Tiger on Buster) from horking up hairballs.
So, as I type on the iBook (which I am doubly grateful to have right now!) DiskWarrior is rebuilding Buster's hard drive. Once that's done, I'm going to just grab whatever data I can and THEN do the clean Tiger install.
As much of a bummer that it is having to go through the expense and gymnastics of repairing Buster's hard disk, this is the first problem I've had in the five years or so that I've had it. How many Windows box owners can say they got that kind of service out of their machine before it had a bad crash? Like I say, it's a bummer, but I have no complaint about my Macs.
