Let the blog see the rabbit...

Flashback to 3rd September:

09:24 Dez: Morning
09:24 Dez: This is ungood
09:24 Dez: I turned my monitor on this morning to find that my mac had crashed
09:24 Dez: I turned it off, turned it on again and after about 5 minutes of it sitting on the grey screen with the whirly whirling, I turned it off
09:25 Dez: Left if a few minutes and turned it on again
09:25 Dez: I come back to find that I've been given a root prompt
09:26 frosty: dez: ooh :/
09:29 Dez: fro> know what the appropriate fsck equivalent is?
09:29 frosty: dez: nope, sorry
09:30 rollercow: dez: fsck oddly enough
09:30 Dez: rc:
09:30 Dez: ** /dev/rdisk0s3
09:30 Dez: BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
09:31 Dez: LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? [yn]
09:31 FireFury: dez: sounds like your hard disk may have exploded
09:31 rollercow: dez: thats generaly not good

I tried several more times to boot and fsck, all to no avail and so bit the bullet and ordered a new hard drive - opting for a 160GB model rather than simply getting an identical 80GB replacement.

I then set about opening my Mac Mini's case in order to allow me to replace the drive when it arrived and discovered that the RAM in it was identical in specification to that in my PC. It had been suggested by sits that it might be the RAM and not the hard drive that had failed, so I swapped the RAM over and lo and behold, the machine booted as normal with no problems at all.

So I didn't need a new hard drive after all. Still, the extra space would be very helpful - every time I want to do anything video related, I have to make space on the drive by moving things onto other machines.

I had a look at finding some replacement RAM, found a suitably-priced 1GB stick and ordered it.

I decided to take photos of the process of installing the new hardware as on my first attempt at opening the case, following rather unclear instructions I found online, I mistakenly attempted (and succeeded :-/ ) in removing the shiny plastic top of my mac mini, rather than the chassis.