Category Archives: etc

Lessons learned on HDD replacement

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I just swapped out the stock 80GB hard drive on my Macbook with a 250GB, 7200rpm model that I picked up from Newegg. The process was not all that smooth, and I didn’t get a ton of help from the internet, so I thought I’d try to earn a little bit of karma and put some observations here for Google to index:

  • There are good tutorials on this process to be found; here is the one that I used.
  • The EMI (electromagnetic interference) shield on the hard drive (which the just-mentioned tutorial calls the “bracket”) is a royal pain in the ass. The screws are Torx T8. As I am not a computer repair professional, I don’t keep every fricking screwdriver under the sun in my apartment. The screw holes in the shield are big enough that you can slide them over the head of the screws, and I thought to myself “Hey, why bother even taking the screws out? This thing can do its EMI-shielding without being attached!”
  • This was a mistake.
  • I slid the new hard drive into the bay with the EMI shield resting on top. Disk Utility did not recognize the hard drive. Since the shield was not attached to the HDD with screws, I couldn’t use the ribbon on the shield to pull the thing out. After about 20 minutes of messing around with some sticky tape and gravity, I managed to get the new, screwless HDD back out the of the computer.
  • It turns out that the reason that the drive wasn’t being recognized was related to the screws: they not only hold the shield on, but they act as guides to make sure that the disk’s connectors line up right. I managed to get one screw out of the old drive with a flathead screwdriver and another one with an Allen wrench. The other two were screwed way too tight to remove without the right tool. I put the two screws I had removed into the connector-end of the HDD, since that’s where the alignment really mattered. That did the trick – Disk Utility saw the drive.
  • As for data movement: I tried the Restore from Time Machine Backup feature on the OS X installation disks. It took about two hours, told me that it had been successful, and then failed to boot. The Leopard install program recognized that there was an instance of OS X on the drive, but I couldn’t boot into it (might have something to do with the fact that the old disk image had driver data associated with a different kind of HDD, I guess).
  • So I wiped the new disk clean and tried installing Leopard first and then using Migration Assistant to bring over my things. After running for about an hour and a half, MA got hung up with “Less than a minute remaining” for about an hour. A little Googling told me that this is fairly common (and might have something to do with printer drivers?). I shut down the computer (by holding down the power key until it shut off – the only way to get out of the MA) and rebooted, running through the OS X setup program again, except this time not importing any info.
  • The setup program created a new user account for me, but the old one, with nearly all my settings intact (minus the ones that were dependent on Leopard updates that weren’t included on the DVD), was still there.

All in all, replacing the hard drive was probably one of the most bitchin and gnarly experiences of my life. Good luck.

Hard work and distraction: together at last

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I just read this piece by Mike Elgan. Elgan’s argument is that hard work is dead in an age where we have Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. to constantly and effortlessly distract us.

There seems to be a mistake in this reasoning. If all that’s changed from now and the golden age of hard work (whenever that might have been) is that we have more media for distraction at hand, what follows immediately is that people were less distracted in the good old days. But to say that someone is less distracted doesn’t suggest anything about their “work ethic” without some meaty assumptions.

The lack of distractions (or, to put it in more neutral terms, the lack of alternative avenues for your attention!): this sounds like the very definition of boredom. But boredom – a state you find yourself in – isn’t directly related to how hard you work – a choice you make. It’s true that boredom might drive you to devote your energies to something in the way that exemplifies a good work ethic, but on the other hand it might not, and you might end up staring at the wall as I so often do. On the flip side, someone who is never bored (i.e. is constantly distracted) might well be working very hard all the time. Anyone who tries to keep up with their feed reader knows how hard you have to work to maintain a respectably high level of distraction.

More importantly, though, the assumption that there is something holy about the work ethic of our grandparents is off. Work ethics are not inherently valuable; they only derive value from their products. Thus, for example, a writer’s work ethic is valuable because of the things that she writes, or even the kind of person she becomes as a result of this work ethic. But things like good writing and being a good person are, as philosophers are wont to say, multiply realizable, and while it’s true that the supposed tunnel vision of our forebears sometimes resulted in the kind of work that is independently valuable, it doesn’t mean that equally good or better work can’t come out of more distributed, “distracted” processes.

Isn’t it at least conceivable that, for instance, an obsessed Twitter user might write a poem that is not only as good as a more “focused” poet, but one that would be impossible without something like Twitter?

This is not to say that I don’t think total focus is not valuable. I do think, however, that distraction can have value too, or at least that the question is an empirical one.