“Invalid node structure”

The hard drive in my beloved white MacBook gave up the ghost last week. The night of the gizmo’s demise saw me shutting down the laptop as usual and looking ahead to a good night’s sleep, only to be met with the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. I had seen the multi-colored wait cursor many times before - a sign of “processor-intensive activity,” a euphemism for “yo’ shit be all locked up, homie” - but never for such an extended period of time. In a fit of irritation, I forced the Mac to shutdown and trudged off to bed.

The next morning, I pressed the power switch, waited several minutes as the laptop churned away, then found myself staring at a black screen with dire messages. The take-home phrase: “invalid node structure.”

“That can’t be good,” I said.

Try as I might, I was unable to resuscitate the failed drive. Apple’s Disk Utility? Useless. (Does Disk Utility ever actually fix a problem?) The much-vaunted DiskWarrior took hours of grinding to tell me the same thing: no sale, no luck. (I was lucky in one sense; the program could have taken weeks to report that it crapped out, as has happened to some.)

It finally became clear that the files on the hard drive - documents, images, movies, music - were irretrievable. Interestingly, this left me less concerned than I had expected. Much of what I produce in daily computer activities - not all, but much - is stored up in the cloud: sitting on this or that server, whether at Google or Photobucket or Steadfast Networks. And the notion of simply starting fresh with a cleaned-out, reformatted drive seemed appealing in many ways. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that that cleaned-out, reformatted drive would have to be another drive altogether, as all attempts to reformat the drive also ended in failure. This was a simple case of failed hardware. Time to go shopping.

A friend at work directed me to Other World Computing (”serving the Mac Universe since 1988″). I browsed OWC’s selection of 2.5″ serial ATA drives and settled on a 200 GB Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 drive with a 16 MB cache. It meant a nice increase in storage from the original Fujitsu 80 MB drive, and cost under $90 even with two-day shipping.

The drive arrived yesterday, Election Day. Normally, I would have immediately set to work on installing it, but prior obligations - an appointment with a sales rep from a home remodeling company, and an election night party - delayed the procedure until Barack Obama made his triumphal address at Grant Park. With the uplifting words of our president-elect ringing in my ears, I swapped out the old drive for the new. Then I installed the Leopard Mac OS X, and a half-hour later I had a working laptop once more. I activated Software Update to being various programs up to current editions and went to bed. (I have got to stop doing these chores late at night.)

This morning, my MacBook was once more ready to serve. It’s awfully zippy, too; don’t know if that’s because of the hard drive cache, or if it’s because the drive isn’t burdened with pesky files and programs. Whatever. Time to start anew - and to implement a backup routine for the machine, because you never know.

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