Returning to class, with class!

Mijn probleem

I'm a student taking 21 hours at two colleges (long story, longer week) and I use my MacBook Air for just about everything. My hard drive in the MBA died, so after a lengthy process of tracking down where the replacement was mis-delivered to by the post office, I installed the new drive and got ready to boot up. Nothing. The drive wasn't showing up at all in Disk Utility when booting using a bootable flash drive I'd made. So, yeah, it turns out that that delicate little cable is in actuality, a delicate little cable. I borked it.

Mijn oplossing

Getting in and out of the MBA is straightforward, but can be tedious, especially for people inexperienced in home repair. It took about ten minutes from start to finish to tear down to the old part, replace it and get everything going again. Now everything is working!*

*Working as in functional, I still had to install OS X 10.6, download the updates for that so I could re-download 10.7 and then restore all my data from backups.

Mijn advies

Be careful with that little micro-zif cable, especially where it connects to the drive itself. If it isn't straight, or if you try it upside down, or if there's a cat hair in there, you will break the thing. Also remember to keep cats away from whatever you use to sort your screws, otherwise you'll loose a few.

One last thing: backups are good.