The Enspired Blog

A few weeks ago I began to notice a significant amount of noise emanating from my Macbook Pro. It started as a winding sound and grew louder and louder as the processor and hard drive worked feverishly to process 380,000 records of property data from the county. The noise became a sustained mooing sound that was insanely loud for a laptop.

At first I thought it was the hard drive, which really concerned me. It seemed to ebb and flow with the amount of processor and disk I/O the Macbook was handling. After a few days I had to figure out what it was, so I turned to google. In the end it was YouTube that provided the answer. It turns out that Macbook Pros are notorious for two problems, bad batteries and mooing fans.

So at this point, since I am not the original owner of this hardware and am not covered under any Apple Care program, I decided to service it myself. A few searches revealed that a handful of online stores carried the replacement parts, but I couldn’t find anyone who had it in stock. I added my email to be notified when inventory became available and put it on the back-burner.

After another week of enduring the worsening noise, I made another quick search for the part. To my surprise I stumbled upon powerbookmedic.com, who just happened to have one unit in stock. I placed my order in a most furious manner to assure that some other mooing fan victim didn’t snag the last available right fan assembly on the entire Internet. With a sense of great victory, my order was processed, confirmed and shipped in a matter of hours.

The part arrived yesterday and I made the simple swap last night. All is well, and the mooing fan has been silenced. A quick run of rake spec:rcov confirmed that the new fan is functioning and the noise has been squelched. I sincerely hope that I don’t need a left fan assembly anytime soon.

Well, I was prepared for a little more pain in upgrading to Leopard. I guess because I took the upgrade path instead of a clean install it required less effort. My existing Rails setup is fully functional by my early assessment. MySQL is alive and kicking, and mongrel fires up just fine. There may be some unnecessary residual stuff by upgrading vs. doing a clean install, but my time is more valuable than a pristine installation at this point.

As a precaution, I went ahead and bought an external hard drive to do a full backup. I’m really amazed at the affordability of drive space these days. I bought a Western Digital My Book, 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for about $120 at Best Buy. I plugged it in and it worked right out of the box. I had read up on the best backup/clone software and had downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!. For some reason though, neither application would successfully complete a backup. So I dug around a little until I found that the My Book drive was preformatted as FAT32, which is cross-platform, but limited to 4GB files.

So I reformatted the My Book drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), verified permissions on my drive and fired up CCC one more time. This time, after 6 1/2 hours, my hard drive was successfully cloned and verified. Feeling secure that my applications and data were safe and accessible, I launched the Leopard installer and everything went smoothly from there.

Today, I’m back to work, finding time to explore the new features of Leopard a little at a time. My Rails environments are functioning as expected and all my supporting applications seem to work. I guess we’ll see if everything continues to work as I get further into some of my edge scenarios, but so far I’m very pleased.