Startup question marks and backing up your HD
A few months ago, starting up my computer resulted in an intermittent question mark flashing on my screen without going any further. Not good. I called Apple and consulted their support article for said problem. Nothing. I thought I’d share my experience because while it was annoying, it helped me learn a bit how startup disks work.
My harddrive would start up but it could no longer boot OS X properly. On one of the last times it worked properly, I quickly backed up the internal 100gb disk using a great program called Caron Copy Cloner and the SATA cradle I wrote about a while back.
For a while (longer than I should have), my computer was booting from this external drive. Imagine the computer as a living body whose heart, linked via USB, existed outside said body. Not pretty.
Nowhere close to as mobile as I normally liked to be, the alternative was going without a computer for a week while AppleCare tried fixing it. In the end, I decided what should have been an obvious option: upgrade the internal drive from 100gb to 320gb. The downside: Even with a dead drive, this upgrade was not at all covered under AppleCare. Bummer but it does feel nice to have a bit more (3.2x) storage space in my machine.
In other news, I don’t normally go for this stuff but the Belkin Flexible USB Cable Adapter is a neat gadget that has made it easier for me to constantly have a USB cable protruding from the side of my computer.
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