Far be it from us, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, to be needlessly alarmist, but if you're one of the lucky souls who has an iBook, YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING TO EXPLODE AT ANY MINUTE!! Worse yet, when it does, it's going to propel shards of jagged glass, radioactive material, and tuna fish contaminated with the anthrax bacterium all over everything within a twenty-foot radius. And worst of all, the tuna's not even dolphin-safe. So run! RUN!!

Ha ha, we're kidding, of course. No, there's no explosive material in your iBook's hard drive, nor is there any glass or plutonium used in the iBook's construction-- and what little tuna exists behind the iBook's battery bay is certified both anthrax-free and dolphin-safe. We simply wanted to make the bad news sound less bad when we broke it to you. See, while your iBook's hard drive isn't literally an incendiary device, there's a fair chance that it's still a ticking time bomb in the metaphorical sense. Perhaps you've been hearing stories about iBook hard disks losing all their data with alarming frequency? If not, there's a pretty good encapsulation of the problem over at Go2Mac. Basically, some people go to boot up their iBooks and get the dreaded blinking question mark; booting the iBook from a CD-ROM works, but the iBook's internal disk still won't show up on the Desktop, and Disk First Aid sees the disk and finds problems, but can't fix them. Reportedly no third-party utilities have been able to repair the damage either.

It seems that this is happening often enough that Apple's Tech Exchange message boards are a blur of frenzied posting activity, and Apple's officially taking notice. For now they are asking for people with affected systems to email them System Profile Reports so they can determine what, if anything, these bummed iBooks have in common. (A bad batch of tuna, perhaps?) In the meantime, if you are among the iBook-enabled, we hope you have a backup strategy in place; nothing wrecks a day faster than sudden data loss. Except possibly explosions, glass shards, radiation poisoning, and anthrax.