The tally as of today: 15 emails, 5 hours on the phone, six different tech support people at four companies (not counting the three home visits from CreativeTechs, and who ultimately threw up their hands in defeat, for $525--grrrr!), three Sata cards, three RMA returns, two hard drive boxes, two operating systems, one overnight delivery. And 18 theories about what is wrong.
The result: everyone is more confused than when we started.
Faithful readers will remember that I just want to transfer big heaping gobs of data from my computer to an external, multi-bay, multi-terabyte box. Through something fast, like a sata cable, not through a wimpy USB connection. What has been happening for the last month is that, no matter the combination of sata card or storage box, the computer freezes up anytime I try.
At the conclusion of the last chapter we were about to install Leopard. I had an empty drive (a super fast 150gb I use as a Photoshop scratch disk) so that I did not have to commit to the upgrade. It's a blank slate. I had a clean install on an empty drive. There was nothing to get in the way.
Once again, it crashed. It's not the OS. Today a new Sata card came, a Sonnet Sata E4P. It crashed. It's not the card.
I pulled memory sticks. I pulled every other card in the computer. I tried transferring from different disk drives. nothing made a difference.
The only thing that got weirder is that, although all my USB ports work fine when the OS is up and running, they don't accept any input from the keyboard during the boot-up cycle. Meaning, I can't do P-RAM. Or open to a command line. Or hold Option down to choose a boot drive.
Actually, that's not quite true. Last night I could. One port worked. Now none do. Maybe tomorrow they all will. Who knows?
I convinced Apple that I needed and deserved a home visit, preferably someone bearing a new motherboard. I didn't even have to threaten to blog about them.
Stay tuned.
Comments