Really now, I just want stuff to work

Is that too much to ask? Grf.

Case in point: my computer surgery from yesterday. Winnowill’s hard drive had started making disturbing, unusually loud noises when spinning up out of hibernation. This concerned me, especially given that everybody I mentioned this to said “yep, time to get a new hard drive”.

So yesterday I went out and got one, along with a new 2G RAM chip so that I could bring Sweet Winnie’s total memory up to a shiny 4G. The new hard drive was a very shiny 320G, twice the capacity of the old one.

Brought these things home, and went to work on doing the restore from my last Time Machine backup. Taking apart the machine and putting in the new RAM and drive was the easy part. As per solarbird‘s instructions this was also supposed to be pretty easy–mostly. Dara brought me the external backup drive and plugged that in, and I booted up from our Snow Leopard install disk. Went into Disk Utilty to format the new drive, and then clicked in to the proper command to restore from a Time Machine backup.

It went swimmingly, up until the part where I rebooted and didn’t get any further than a blue screen and a little spinning progress wheel that came and went every few seconds. To wit, um.

Tried a second pass through the entire procedure, with the same results.

Turned out I had to totally re-install Snow Leopard on the drive. Which fortunately didn’t overwrite any of my old data, but it did mean I had to re-download all of the software updates that Apple has dropped since Snow Leopard came out. Which was vexing. (And which, tangentially, led me to repro a bug in one of our games that I’ll have to be chatting with folks about at work tomorrow.)

Now the computer seems happy enough. Which is of course a perfect time for WordPress plugins to start going blooey on me. YAY! And by yay, I mean, AUGH!