Recovering Hard Drive Data

I was busy prepping for a presentation when my laptop, which had been a semi-reliable friend for more than six years, shuffled off this mortal coil without even requesting last rites.  I'm no newbie when it comes to assisting electronics as they limp along toward their graves (my graduate assistantship was in electronic music, for goodness sake), so you can take my word for it when I say there was no hope.  None that would have made fiscal sense when compared with a new computer purchase, I mean.

And so I immediately slid over to the Apple web store and purchased a new 24" iMac.  It arrived a few days later.  (And it is, without a doubt, a beauty.  Particularly when compared with my "veteran" laptop.)  Alas, as I was cleaning my desk for its arrival, I made perhaps the most boneheaded move of my life: I picked up the 500GB G-Drive that held my file backups without first powering it down.  Yep, you guessed it.  The bad boy kicked like a handgun as the heads slammed into the spinning platters.  Double-oops.

As you might imagine, I was concerned.  I did have one ray of hope, however.  I was fairly certain the TiBook failure was an electronics issue and not another catastrophic hard drive failure.  I crossed my fingers that I might coax the old laptop drive contents onto my new desktop machine.  Luckily, I turned out to be right.

I hopped over to Best Buy and purchased a Rocketfish 2.5" drive enclosure.  Well, purchased isn't honestly the correct term.  Instead, I utilized what we Once Upon A Time--in a former life as a Radio Shack employee nearly twenty years ago--termed a "30-day free rental."  (If you can't deduce how this might work, shoot me an email.)  The Rocketfish worked like a charm, and all my files were safely on the new machine.  Replacing the guts in the G-Drive and my new backup strategy are topics for another day, however.

I'm torn over what I should do with the TiBook's carcass.  This is the first time I've ever replaced a dead Mac; all my other purchases were upgrades.  I had planned to set up all my old computers--from my Atari 800XL to the TiBook--in the Hobby Room of our new home.  I'm certain I can get my old LCIII (I'd like to use her as a central system for my model railroad) and PowerMac 5200 (perhaps for HyperCard programming and use as a household X10 system) humming again, but the TiBook seems beyond hope.  For now, she's tucked away in my laptop bag, until I buy her replacement.