About a month back, Lisa’s MacBook Air (2008 vintage) gave up the ghost. It just wouldn’t boot anymore. I bought the machine back in 2008 so four years running, that isn’t too bad. It is the second generation MacBook Air, and still has a 1.8″ hard drive, no fancy SSDs here. It died though. I took it down to the Apple store recently and let them have a look at it.

I was hoping that it would be dead, and we would have to buy another nice MacBook Air for her. Then, through some magic of my own I would be able to bring the thing back to life somehow and I could use the old one. But Lisa is a practical woman, and so we just paid about $100 and had them throw in a new hard drive since that is what went wrong. At the same time, there was some sort of bulletin out on that machine, and we were eligible for a free replacement of the screen mount (with new screen!) since the hinges were known to be bad on that model. That is pretty sweet, getting a new screen for free. So we did that too.

I wasn’t too worried about the hard drive since we have time machine backups on the Time Capsule (500gb, also bought in 2008.) It took a few days, but the machine was repaired, and I brought it home. It booted up fine, and things looked good, so I decided to try to start up the Time Capsule and restore the old data back onto the machine.

This is where things started to get tricky. First off, I dug around until I found the original install disks for the MacBook Air. I finally found those and got the machine up and running via the external DVD drive. I found the Time Machine restore option, it found my Time Capsule fine, and the restore started. I’ve done this once or twice before, so I expected about 16 hours or so to do the full restore over wireless network (there is no built in ethernet port on the MacBook Air, and the USB port was taken up with the install DVD – I don’t have the ethernet dongle anyway.) After an hour or so, an error popped up saying that the Time Machine backup couldn’t be read.

Uh oh.

I checked the Time Capsule and it was flashing amber, indicating a problem. After firing up AirPort Utility, I saw a little message: “S.M.A.R.T. Status: Drive failing”. Oh, that isn’t good. I was prompted to plug in an external USB disk and copy data off the time capsule ASAP. Since I happen to have a 1 TB disk laying around, and the Time Capsule is only 500 GB, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. I formatted the external drive as a Mac Filesystem and plugged it in … nothing happened.

I checked a bunch of things, made sure the disk would show up on my MacBook Pro (it does – that is where I formatted it) and tried again. No go. So I guess I can’t plug it in to the Time Capsule and copy the data off. I should be able to still mount the Time Capsule as a disk and copy the sparsebundles for each machine I have backed up though. So I tried that. Unfortunately, the Time Capsule made a strange clicking sound, and I didn’t think the disk was even spinning. So … What to do?

Well, I’ve been around the block a few times, so I threw the Time Capsule in the freezer, right under the frozen strawberries over night.

When I came home the next day, I was able to connect to the Time Capsule and copy both of the backup files off of the disk to the external USB drive now plugged in to my MacBook Pro. Once the MacBook Air backup file was on the external USB drive, I was able to use Disk Utility to repair it (it needed one round of repairs before things looked good) and then ready to try to install again.

After digging around in my bag of tricks for a while, I found a powered USB hub and plugged in the external DVD drive and the hard drive, then booted up.

But the MacBook Air didn’t see the DVD drive. Oh yeah, that’s right, Apple decided for some reason to only let the DVD drive work if it was plugged directly into the single USB port on the MacBook Air. Why? Why? I don’t know. But that is what they did.

So now I have set up Remote Install on my MacBook Pro and have it sharing the install DVD over the network (and of course the MacBook Air can’t see the Time Capsule network when I have WEP encryption on, so I have to remove encryption) and now it is trying to boot off of that. It looks like it is working but I bet it will take a long time before I can get up to the screen where I can choose to restore from the external USB drive with the Time Machine image. Man I hope that works.

(Many days later)

Installing over a networked-shared remove DVD worked. That is really amazing. How much technology do we need to have for that to actually be a reasonable sort of thing to do? It is amazing how far computers have come since I started out on my Dad’s Apple //e back in the early 80s.

At any rate, I was able to get to the “Restore” option from the remote install DVD, and it was able to see the Time Machine file on the attached USB disk. I was able to recover Lisa’s data, so now we are back to a working MacBook Air for her, and my MacBook Pro for me. And an ex-linux now Windows machine (ugh – I want to go to linux but the flash performance is so terrible that I was forced to install Windows) for videos.

The Time Capsule (maybe it is first or second generation?) gets very hot. It ran fine for about four years straight, so I have nothing bad to say about it at all. I’ll go to the Apple store and get a new one at some point, but we’re a bit tight on cash right now (and more taxes are due shortly – the car tax, local property type tax, and some other sort of tax are on the way) so I’ll just use the external disk as a weekly manual backup for now.

I should also note that we rented “Charlie and Chocolate Factory” (well, the new one with Johnny Depp since Lisa hasn’t seen either of them) and “Kung Fu Panda” the other day. For some reason the DVD player we have is broken too! So we needed to watch the DVDs on my MacBook, which worked, but requires some cable swapping. Lisa’s TV (maybe 6 years old now?) only has one HDMI port, but it has a bunch of strange ports that I’ve never seen before (D4 they are called. I think.) So we are just full of electronic mysteries today.