computer drama

So I built a hackintosh over the weekend. it was a pain in the ass, and I can see why some people would just prefer to buy a legit mac then deal with that. My problem was, I needed something that apple doesn't offer, so I had to build it myself. With Rob hooking me up with a free case and power supply my total cost was around $350 and I was able to build a nice theater pc that will hide in the closet and provide all my movies and music and such to the living room. This was less then a mac mini, more powerful, and more upgradable.

One of the main problems I had was getting OSX actually installed on the hard drive. The mac can't read any IDE CD drives and needs SATA. I went to best buy, and the only sata drives they had were bluray and I wasn't interested in spending that much money for something I would never use. so I ran to target, and they had a cheap $40 internal DVD drive that would be perfect since all I would ever use it for would be to install the operating system. I probably would have just returned it afterwards.

I get it home, and it turns out that it's IDE, so that's a waste.. So I got this idea to install the OS by getting it on the hard drive before installing it in the new machine. Problem is, I only have an iMac and laptops, and there is no way to add a SATA drive to those machines to install. So I remembered a $50 thing at best buy that was basically an external SATA-usb2 device, and I could just install the OS on the drive like that... except, when I get there, best buy closes at 7pm.

I get home distraught because I can't finish the project, and then I get this genius idea. I bust open my mybook and it turns out, it's a SATA drive in there. So I unhook it, hook the new drive in, plug it in to the laptop, and install OSX right on the drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure, put it into the new computer, and everything is working great.

This long ass back story is just to show the irony of this part. Last night I get home, run upstairs to hop on the iMac for a second, and it's not working at all because the hard drive cashed. It's shot. The computer had been running really weird the last few weeks, and I upgraded the ram thinking that might be the culprit, I never once thought it was the beginning of a hard drive crash. I ran disc utility which was saying that the B tree was screwed up, I looked it up online and found a program that can apparently rebuild that tree called diskwarrior. I downloaded that, and that couldn't even find the drive. So I knew then the entire drive was shot. After spending my entire Sunday working with hard drive problems, and staring at the insides of a computer, I spent all Monday night doing the same thing.

This was a little bit different though. While the media pc is just a case with all the junk and guts easy to access, this was an iMac, an all in one pc that looks nice, but is a serious pain in the ass to access anything but the ram.

This is what I had to deal with to get into the machine... it's actually easier than it looks in that computer abortion picture above. Take the ram plate off, unscrew the other 4 screws on the bottom, lift off the front panel, unscrew the 8 screws around the lcd, lift that out. Now you have what you see in that picture. The hard drive, which I always thought was a laptop drive, is a legit drive. So I put the hard drive that's in the external mybook, and hooked that up inside the media pc, copied all the media off of it onto the internal media pc drive, and then reformatted it and put it in the iMac, and reassembled. I used the discs that came with the iMac, but that only installed Tiger, so I'll spend tonight after class loading Leopard and the slew of software I used to have on there.

Luckily I keep my important stuff in an online dropbox and on external storage so the data loss is minor. Just read this windy post and remember to back your stuff up, and remember that stuff always goes wrong.