My Trip to the Genius Bar, Part 2

In the previous post I explained about the apparent failure of my MacBook Air hard drive. My exhaustive troubleshooting led to nowhere but more panic—the realization that months of data was gone, and I hadn't backed up.

This closing chapter explains how I put my trust in an Apple Genius, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the data could still be recovered from a sick but not yet dead hard drive. And there was always a possibility that the Genius might save the patient.

There are two Apple stores in the San Diego area. I signed onto the concierge page of the closer store, but there was no Genius Bar opening until 15 minutes before store closing, which wouldn't be enough time to troubleshoot my problem. So I checked the farther store, which had one opening much sooner, at 3:20 p.m. PDT. My crisis had started around 11:50 a.m. PDT, after which I spent more than 2 hours troubleshooting. So, I got in the car and drove toward La Jolla.

Surprisingly, I passed through the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—in Internet time. By the time I arrived at the Apple Store, I had already accepted that my data was gone. I held little realistic hope the Apple Genius could help me, even though I had to try. Perhaps my own troubleshooting and previous experience with ailing hard drives helped resolve the grieving process.

Something else: There was a certain relief in the loss. Music I paid for and kept on an external drive. I post important photos to my SmugMug gallery, and most pictures were archived a month ago. The others would be a loss, but not painfully. Writing is done mostly on the Web and stored on a blog server. I cared most about e-mail, which I should have moved to a server long ago. That said, e-mail also has become a burden. There is simply too much of it, and managing the mail is increasingly time-consuming.

I determined to use the crisis as new beginning. I would adopt more 21st century behavior. Rather than organize mail, I would dump it in fewer folders and use search to find stuff. I switched to search long ago, but continued to organize mail anyway. I also would move e-mail to the server, which made sense since I only use IMAP anyway. Last night, I started the change, which will take several days at least.

By the way, my iPhone proved indispensable during the crisis. I used the phone to get personal and corporate e-mail throughout yesterday and even today. I'll need to reset the corporate account password, which I don't remember, before e-mail is fully restored on the desktop.

Genius Knows Best
I arrived at the Apple Store 15 minutes early for my appointment. A concierge said the appointment would be 10 minutes late, which is wasn't. The Apple Genius was cordial and helpful. I didn't wait for him, explaining exactly what had occurred and the troubleshooting that followed. He started the computer, which after some delay began flashing that ominous folder and question mark. He then turned off the MacBook Air, left and came back with an external hard drive. Using a diagnostic tool, he detected the hard drive but not its status.

The Genius restarted the Air in single-user mode, which I hadn't tried. Mac OS X booted up to the log-in screen, the farthest since the initial crash. No farther and never again on subsequent reboots. During the process, the Genius left four or five times for the employee area, perhaps for consultation. I could see by his facial expression what I had thought: unrecoverable, failing hard drive. He performed additional diagnostics, including booting a Mac OS X DVD from an external drive into Disk Utility, which a single time detected the hard drive. When disk repair failed, he figuratively called the time of death.

He gave me three options: Keep the MacBook Air and take it in for data recovery; send it in for repair; or get a replacement from the store. "Replacement? Really?" I thought. Gulp. I had already reached the stage of accepting that the data was gone, and I was unwilling to pay the typically high data recovery cost. I couldn't wait around for repair. If my data was lost, replacement sounded good to me. The Genius spoke to a manager, and a few minutes later I walked out with a new MacBook Air.

While the Genius worked on the Air, three other people sat down for help from his peers—and all had hardware problems. One gentleman was having trouble with his iPhone, which rebooted suddenly and otherwise acted strangely. The Genius discussed refreshing the firmware, which must not have worked, because the customer walked out with a replacement phone. A young woman sat down with a MacBook, the hard drive of which had crashed. A bit of testing later, she got a new hard drive with a fresh copy of Leopard installed.

I'm a scratched record about perceptions being everything in business. Hardware failures are unfortunately inevitable. One or two here and there multiplied by millions of purchasers could be a seemingly large number of dissatisfied customers. The Genius Bar isn't just about customer service, but customer satisfaction and positive perceptions. That guy with the replacement iPhone felt pretty good. He didn't have to plead for one; the Genius offered. So Apple comes off as the company that cares, that will do the right thing by customers.

I was feeling pretty good, too, until I got that new MacBook Air home. The initial setup was normal, except for some glitch connecting to the Internet. The process concluded, and should have proceeded to the Mac OS X desktop. Instead, the screen had an unusual flutter and stopped at a baby blue background. I rebooted several more times to the same background, with the mouse cursor as the only other visual element. I assumed the computer might have a bad OS image. I've seen this before on Windows PCs. So I booted up from a Mac OS X startup disc but, shock of shocks, ended up at the same blue screen. After running a hardware diagnostic, with everything passing, I called the Apple Store.

Behavioral Changes
Can you see where this is going? Around 6:15 p.m., I headed back to the Apple Store, where the concierge took the Air in the back for servicing. Thirty minutes later, she popped out and asked for my user name and password. Booting into safe mode had slowly gotten the computer to the log-in screen. Another 20 minutes passed and she came out carrying the replacement Air on top of the box for another one. I would be getting my second new MacBook Air of the day.

I'm now using that new Air, which breathes easily. There is no clicking sound, and the system is noticeably faster, presumably because of the hard drive. The second Air doesn't bother me, because Apple so quickly replaced not one, but two, computers. The first replacement was generous.

I've also started to complete a process half-done for several years. Most of my work and fun takes place beyond the desktop, but I kept many outdated desktop habits. There's this desktop myth propagated by Adobe, Microsoft, even Apple and many other desktop software developers about rich clients. Web 2.0 is for real. Most people don't spend most of their time in desktop applications, except perhaps those glued to Outlook and 1990s habits.

The only data I really must locally consume is music, and that is more by choice. Photos go from camera to PC but end up in an online gallery. I write either in a Web browser (for blogging and social networking), e-mail program, IM client or text editor. I rarely use programs like Word because I don't need the desktop formatting. I could easily save rich-text, HTML or XML documents in the server cloud, like iDisk. I use an RSS client (NetNewsWire) but the feeds sync to a server for recovery and browser access.

So, from today, I will start moving more away from the desktop to the server cloud. What little locally stored data will be backed up. The approach should make easier my constant switching between Leopard and Windows Vista for testing purposes. Suddenly, I'm an unexpected and enthusiastic MobileMe anticipant. I wish July 11 were tomorrow.

My question to you: Do you know where your data is? And is it safe?

Posted by Joe Wilcox on June 18, 2008 3:41 PM