Have you ever had a computer die due to a bad disk or something else unidentified? All of us probably have or will. Hence the need for backing up your data or in Gear Diary’s case, our server.

Recently, my 12 inch G4 PowerBook died. Or at least I thought it did. One day I turned it on and it locked up and the disk started making those horrific noises. A sure sign of a bad disk. I tried running diagnostics on the disk and yep it was dead. I figured I would replace it and get it going again someday. Fortunately I had most of the data backed up.

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Well, I was spring cleaning in my office Sunday and decided to throw the Mac OS X 10.4 disk in the DVD drive and power it on. I ran through the install and imagine seeing what you thought was a previously dead disk come back to life, take a full install, be updated and have several apps installed because that is exactly what happened. I merrily used my PowerBook until the wee hours of the morning and it’s still working as I type this.

There is likely still an intermittent issue with the disk, so until I get it replaced, I will keep using my PowerBook as a secondary computer, saving anything I really need to the hard disk until I get a new disk in it.

Have you ever had a computer that you swear was dead spring back to life months later? Share your story!