buddy, it is the time!

It's been a while. Let me leave here some story I've been in these days...pretty nerdy story.

As some of u know already, my petit-old buddy (Powerbook G4 15") is experiencing bad days...
suddenly on Wed, his performance gets way sloppy i even thought it was frozen.
i rebooted holding the power button, and this time it really got frozen at the Apple logo. Sh*t happens - i already felt this will be long night. Well, not only that night i needed actually... Because of physical rebooting for many times or other reasons, turns out the file system got damaged. (NOTE, don't reboot it that way for many times.) Although the Install DVD works now, Diskutility is no longer helpful. Nor does the command fsck -fy.

NOW WHAT?

First thing's first. I need to backup all files right? I can still get into the system as Single User Mode. OK so i connected external RAID disk thru Firewire, But it cannot be mounted. Even mkdir got kicked back with "Read-Only Filesystem" Oh boy... I am an administrator now in it
While on a little break, I found that I never tried Target Disk Mode (TD Mode) yet. TDM is one of the features in Apple Computers. Hold T (or command+T) after the boot beep, then Firewire icon shows up on screen. That's TD Mode, which you can connect your Mac through Firewire to other machines to transfer files using your Mac just as an external drive. This is IT! I brought my buddy at lab & connect lab Mac (far brand newer generation - Intel Xeon QuadCore by the way) after some struggling my Mac was finally mounted on Desktop. YES! now i can backup... File were like millions of heavy p**ps, then there's time limit (took 2 days to finish since the lab was closed at first day), BUT I managed to copy all necessary files on my RAID. D*mn took forever

Now i can mess up this drive. Fry on stove? or Boil? I remembered about Disk Warrior. It's like a formula among Mac Users to try this software when none of system-bundled utils work at all. YES the rumor was right - Diagnostics, Rebuild, Preview Mount, Replace, Done. Super. Now it never fail to mount on other machine as TD Mode, plus i can start OSX & reach to Desktop -- Under some conditions.
the some conditions is that i have to keep the laptop tilted, so as not to hear the weird buzzing sound on HDD spinning. Otherwise on horizontal place, it keeps groaning that sounds like failing access.
Well pretty much possibility that HDD is gone. Sh*t happens...

No matter which i take my buddy to, I need to get him back healthy to some extent. It cannot be even selled if HDD is just like this (I'm a nice & polite 24hrs-smiley Japanese ).
So maybe i'll exchange HDD by myself AppleCare is already expired anyway.

Just a lil story (excuse?) these days why i've not been at lab... but i learned a lot. a bit familiar with stuffs i was doing back in the days

Buddy now it's the time to leave my hands. i'll meet u again, re-borned u again.

# so nerdy tale, but i started computer thing when i was 9 or 10 from Macintosh (classic series), and the first animation software i used was Hypercard. u guys know it?? ^^;

ref:
Knoppix