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Electricity Hates Me

The power went off then right back on this morning, and it may have surged as well. I turned the eMac back on after the power came up, and “Cyclops” my 160gb external hard drive wasn’t mounted to the desktop. I turned it off and on again, rebooted the eMac again, nothing. I plugged the firewire drive into the Powerbook, and it came right up, so luckily the drive isn’t fried. But I think my Firewire ports are. I tried plugging the firewire drive into both of them and it wouldn’t mount. I plugged in my iPod and it will charge, but it won’t mount either. I’m going to reinstall OSX tonight and see if it could be a software issue, but I doubt it. I’ve been wanting to reinstall everything anyway, because I installed a ton of software when I first got the Mac to try everything out, but there is a lot I don’t use anymore. So I want to start over now that I know more about the system.

If it’s not a software issue I guess I’ll have to call Apple and see what it’ll cost to fix. I don’t have Applecare on that machine, and I don’t think a power surge would be covered anyway. :( Sigh. I have bad luck with electricity.

I bought a 650v surge protector/battery backup from Apple this morning just to try to keep it from happening again. So now I will have 30 - 45 minutes to finish my work, save everything, and shut down before I lose battery life. It’s also a good surge protector, and has an unlimited warranty on any equipment hooked up to it. But I don’t really know how well those warranties stand up. I’m sure it’s quite difficult to actually get them to pay. But stopping the computer from just clicking off when the power goes out should be a lot better than what I have now, which is just a $30 power strip/surge protector from Office Depot or something.

tsk, tsk, Derek. You know you should have had an UPS in place before all of this. Hopefully nothing was ruined. If you find your eMac is unusable, send it to me and I will send back a thank you card.

Yes, that would have been the smart thing to do… If you can build and send me a time machine, I will go back in time and get a UPS so that my eMac won’t be ruined. Then I will go forward in time to retrieve a sports almanac, because a multi-billionaire after I come back in time to bet on all of the races, then I will send you a brand new eMac in the future/past! Deal?

Hell, if you are going to go through all of that trouble you might as well get me a dual G5. The only problem I see there is that Apple will release the 3ghz the very next day.

Well, if you’ll provide me with a time machine, I wouldn’t mind bringing back a 40,000 jiggawatt G89 from the future for you.

Just as long as it can run Vim I will be cool with that :)

So there was a power outage and your $30 surge protector didnt protect your computer? Whats the point in that?

Now I’m worried that my surge protector (power strip thing) won’t do its job … I hope your computer is OK.

Yeah, looks like it didn’t do a very good job of protecting anything. Those cheap surge suppressors actually stop surge suppressing in a couple of years too, then they just turn into powerstrips. So yeah, invest in a good battery backup. There are little tiny power outages that you don’t even notice and that don’t actually turn off the computer all the time, but they are still hard on the computer, and those battery backups are supposed to stop all of that.