#TFTL @MacSales!

Irony is: Tweeting on a whim that you need a new external hard drive during downtime at work and going home to your current external suddenly not docking on your computer.

That fateful day one month ago made my body want to heave, and I wanted to go into a full-blown panicky tantrum, but I stayed calm and reasoned all that I had learned in my Apple days. My G-Drive mini’s light was blinking, meaning some sort of power was getting somewhere. No clicks or errant noises were coming from within the closure – a most excellent sign. Clicking hard drives are no one’s friends. (Unless you are a cyber terrorist.) I ran all the necessary tests: Disk Utility, switching from FireWire to USB 2.0, connecting the G-Drive to my other computer – Everything came up empty.

I checked Apple’s website to verify the warranty on my drive, and when I saw the 3-year warranty feature, I felt a wave of relief. I had purchased the hard drive just shy of three years ago, so I immediately hopped onto G-Tech’s website to see what my options were. I called and emailed G-Tech only to learn that hardware purchased prior to 2008 had a two-year warranty, not a three-year warranty. I purchased my drive in 2006. This calls for the response “Balls.”

Luckily I’m surrounded by wise and tech-savvy friends in my circle, so after a visit to Chnacat during which she went “sledding” with my HD, she verified to me (in a remarkable Southern accent!) that my data was undamaged – HALLELUJAH! The next step was to procure a hard drive enclosure so that I could access my data in hopes to move it to a new unit. Chnacat recommended MacSales and sent me off with the keywords to look for: PATA, 3.5″, etc. I hopped onto Other World Computing’s site, typed in the necessary bits, and found a handful of options that all cost about $40. For a situation where I merely wanted to transfer my data once and for all into its new home, I wanted something else. I wrote to MacSale’s customer support (highly recommended by Chnacat), and got a response that day about this magical thing called the Newer Technology Universal Drive Adapter. I even had the option to send in follow-up questions – And they were answered! All the Universal Drive Adapter does is transfer data. The tagline is it’s “The ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of Disk Connectivity.” It cost thirty bucks, arrived at my doorstep, and brought my otherwise dead hard drive back to life! After plugging in a couple cords, voila, the G-Drive remounted.

I migrated everything to my new 1 TB LaCie (which came at less than the price of the 250 GB G-Drive Mini a la 2006), and everything is preserved once again. I’ve got room for my photos, music, documents, and backups, and it’s such a relief.

Everything about this photo is magical:

Thanks to everyone who kept me cool when the fate of physical memory was in limbo.

#TFTL @MacSales! (Thanks for the love.)

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