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Feb 26, 2013

Voiding the Warranty
last update: 02/26 @ 22:43
 You see… It’s like this…

Sarah’s old MacBook Pro was getting pretty unreliable, shutting down at inopportune times and giving her an error message about the disk being full. And until TaxCut Pro works on my Linux machine, we need her machine to be stable this time of year. (She needs a stable machine all year around, of course.)

So Sarah has a shiny new iMac — she has two Kindles and less reason for a laptop these days. Then I tackled the problem of getting her old files off the laptop and onto the iMac.

I figured with both on the wireless network, copying across the network should work. I could only get about 10GB copied before rsync bombed out.

Several times.

 Of course, I’m very happy to see rsync on both her Macs just waiting to be needed. And with the stability problems, I’m sure it wasn’t rsync’s fault.

Giving it more thought, I decided a very small wired network might work better anyway — 1Gb vs. 54Mb over the wireless. (A simple crossover cable didn’t work, I needed to dig a switch out of my discards pile — so that meant 100Mb rather than 1Gb because the switch was old.) After about 17Gb, the MacBook just died.

Several times.

So it was time for the heavy guns…

 I pulled out the hard drive. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right size torx to get the mounting screws out, so I couldn’t get it into the case Amazon so nicely sent us. It felt wrong to leave the hard drive completely out in the open for the hour or so of copying (among other things, we have cats), so I stuck it in a zip lock.

That worked fine.

Amazon is sending me the right size torx screwdriver (I think) just in case this comes up again — and to help us give Robert some cool parts for his robot art project in school.

If I was Justin, I’d be planning on putting a Raspberry Pi in the MacBook case. But I’m not so I expect the case is bound for recycling rather than reuse…



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