That’s the sound the hard disk in my PowerBook made yesterday afternoon before everything seized up and the spinning-pizza-wheel-of-death span … to death. My hard disk died. DiskWarrior said, “Speed inhibitied by disk malfunction”, and my security paranioa, extending to Open Firmware passwords made getting into it a bloody hassle. Until I came across this:

Disabling Password Protection
1) Boot into the Open Firmware. (Command + Option + O + F)
2) Type “setenv security-mode none” and press return.
3) Enter in the password at the password request prompt and press return.
4) Then type “reset-all” to restart the computer.
Force Removing Password Protection
1) Add or remove DIMMs to change the total amount of RAM in the computer.
2) Then, the PRAM must be reset 3 times. (Command + Option + P + R)

Then I could use Firewire in Target Disk Mode onto a friend’s computer, with blazing fast transfer speeds of hahahahaha 500Mb an hour. So along with a recent backup, I managed to scrape out the last two days work. Now my entire life is on one small 2.5″ external hard drive, which thanks to the joy of NetInfo Manager and a stroke of genius that I could change the directory path in it, is now my Home folder.

And my beloved PowerBook? It’s in the shop waiting on a new hard drive. It’s gonna bleed my credit card like a little pig. eeeek! eeeeeek! eeeek!