Estimated reading time: 4 minute(s)

OK… If you’re following along at home, you might think that last week’s troubles ended with the PowerBook hard drive failing (or perhaps you might even think they ended last week?) 🙂 That is not the case. So, the saga continues with another trip to the Apple Store on Thursday night, following the failure of yet another hard drive!

Thursday morning I was hoping to have a more successful day… just really hoping to finish the crazy week with a normal, quiet day. Wednesday night, Jen & I spent a little time going through the iTunes store to choose some music for her to use her $15 gift card on. That was fun, and after some tough choices, she settled on just the right songs to spend her gift money on. I sent the links up to the computer where we store our iTunes music library on Wednesday night, and made the purchases that following Thursday morning.

After all had downloaded, I went to get Jen’s iPod, and connected it to the computer. It mounted, and started updating, just as it always does. But right as it finished, it gave a little error message. Something like, “Unable to write to disk” or something. That sounded bad, but I assumed it was some strange glitch, and just unmounted the iPod drive and then re-connected it.

That’s when everything got broked again.

The iPod decided not to show up as it is supposed to. It thought it was updating, but iTunes (nor my computer) did not see it. I tried a few things, but eventually it just froze up my two applications that handle mounting iPod hard drives. I tried to force quit both of those, and nothing happened there… so I eventually decided to just unplug the iPod.

It didn’t like that.

It tried to restart, and was not successful. It restarted, then crashed, then restarted, then crashed… until the battery finally died. 🙁 It was a physical hard drive failure. We had just had that happen not 3 months ago! So, the best part was, I assumed it was still warranteed, and we took it up to the Apple Store (our second visit in as many nights.)

I need to make this long story short, so here are the highlights:

1) Long wait at the Apple Store… grumpy Genius handled my troubled iPod
2) “You’re out of warranty,” says grumpy Genius.
3) “How far out of warranty?” asks Greg. “I can’t tell,” replies grumpy Genius.
4) I notice on the paper that the 90-day warranty began on 10-18-2006. It was 1-19-07 that night. ARGH!!! Thankfully, the manager whom we know was working that night, and she took care of us. 🙂
5) They ship back our iPod, and order a new one for us, free of charge.

So, that kind of worked…

Friday morning, I had to restart my computer because Tuesday night the iPod crash had frozen up my disk utility program. So, when I got the chance, I restarted. BUT… for some reason, it spun up my external hard drive, and then would not quit. After waiting a very long time, I decided to force it to shut down. When the external drive is spinning, and you do a forced shut down… that makes a very very bad sound.

I spent the next 45 minutes I think doing all I could to save my 500GB external drive from a hard shut down. Thankfully, that actually worked! Was my luck changing? Were things technological going to begin to improve for me?

Guess not.

Sunday we got the call that the iPod was in and we could come pick it up. Jen did, and when she returned I went up and happily connected it to the computer, so we could load all 25GB or so of our music on there.

It didn’t show up. The computer, and iTunes were not recognizing it. I tried several different things. Nothing. I unplugged it (not recommended) and tried again… again nothing. Finally, the third time I unplugged it, I got the bad, BAD sound again! It fell right back into that loop the last one had done. Restart, crash, restart, crash…

You get the point.

Yes, folks. The REPLACEMENT for the REPLACEMENT of the REPLACEMENT … CRASHED! The FIRST TIME I CONNECTED IT!!!

It has been a very bad technology week here. 🙁

So, we’re headed to the Apple store tonight to have them order another one for us. It’s warranteed… but come on. This is ridiculous!!! Hoping the curse has run its course….

I’ll let you know in episode three…