2003 • March • 12

iBooks Don't Get Thirsty

Just for future reference: No matter what your cats think, iBooks never get thirsty for a nice big tumbler of water. Nor do they ever have a need to soak in the contents of said tumbler overnight.

Although now, I have an expensive, dead laptop that makes white noise sounds not unlike the ocean when it's plugged in. And it smells like the magic blue smoke when it's let out of the chip.

I just hope that the hard drive is recoverable. Updates will be sporadic as I try to reconstruct my environment and remember passwords and try to find serial numbers.

Oh yeah, and still on the trail of the job hunt. Going to be tweaking some things around here as I have time, to make things a bit more presentable for company.

shortname=thirsty_ibook

Archived Comments

Chris Pirillo

2003-03-12T00:39:52

d00d. Drivesavers.
Anders Jacobsen

2003-03-12T06:54:27

Sorry to hear about that! Ibas ( http://www.ibas.com/ ) are quite famous for tricky cases; but there is a whole load of options nearer you on this list: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Hardware/Storage/Data_Recovery/ Good luck & let us know how the story ends!
l.m.orchard

2003-03-12T07:26:58

Woo! Thanks for the pointers guys - this is one of those things that I know, in theory, that someone does somewhere. My first impulse was to take a laptop apart and plug the drive in and see what happens. But, I squashed that impulse as very dumb. And possibly very expensive.
Jason Clark

2003-03-12T13:20:07

Wow. Same thing (nearly) happend to me on Sunday... except I did the knocking over. Poured a whole glass of water onto the keyboard of my (month old) 15" Powerbook. In a fit of superhuman speed brought on by fear of a $2K+ doorstop, I grabbed it, inverted it, and unpluged AC power all in one motion. Hit the power button, hit enter on all the prompts, and got it shut down in under a minute. Once I felt I'd got all the water out that I could, I set it upright and removed the keyboard. I *carefully* dried any visible water inside with pieces of paper towel, and used a hair dryer to get the moisture out of the keyboard. Half hour later, upon reassembly, It started up fine... and then screamed like a banshee for abt 2 seconds. After a few more random (and heartstopping) screams, some keyboard testing, and leaving it open for a few hours to dry somemore, I'm happy to report it's alive. Slight rattle in the left speaker, I think, but beats a dear machine. Best of luck recovering your hard drive. I wasn't nearly so lucky when my work laptop's (dell win2k) HD died abt 6 months ago... only to learn that I had a major project that *wasn't* in my backups or source code control.
l.m.orchard

2003-03-12T14:57:06

Yeah, unfortunately, this spillage must've happened sometime in the wee hours when I was snoring away. So, it had plenty of time to bathe and get well and thoroughly sizzled. My girlfriend found it in the morning, and loathe was she to wake me with that news. Apple informed me that the repair would likely cost just slightly less than the price of a new iBook.
Ultimatum

2003-03-17T07:25:34

haha... Les.. its Ultimatum from Industry. Glad to see you havent lost your unique sense of humor. heh.