Dock 22

This time it was scary... and I'm still scarred because I'm not sure what happened and if it will happen again. I hope it's not a hard-drive problem but it sure looked like it even thou the Disk Utility didn't report any problem. I had shut down the laptop for a while and when I came back, it didn't start. There was no rEFit menu as the MacBook seemed to go directly to Mac OS X. But Mac OS X wouldn't start either. I would get to this screen where a progress bar appears but the progress bar kept returning to zero and start all over again. I then booted using an Ubuntu Live CD holding the "c" key at start up. It booted fine and all my data seemed ok. So I backed up all of it to another computer. Again, Linux saved my day. I then tried to reinstall over the current partition but no go. The installation utility kept telling me some error occurred trying to install and advising me to try again. The only way I found to install OSX was by removing all existe...

If you've read my previous post about the problems I've been having with my HP dv6000 laptop, you might know about the workaround I found to turn the laptop on when it refuses by removing the battery first. If you've read the comments on that post, you might also know that that workaround stopped working a few weeks ago. So the laptop is again on it's way to HP for repair. Backing up my data... but the laptop doesn't start! I was a bit scared about my data on the hard drive at first. Since the laptop wouldn't turn on, I couldn't back up my recent data (actually a few photos of a special day and some of my girlfriends documents... and a NBA Live save game...). HP told me that there was nothing they could do. It's part of their repair process to reformat the drive and reinstall the system and they don't do backups. This is on their warranty agreement and they confirmed this on the phone. They also told me, here comes the good news, that I could remove...