Entries tagged with “Crash” from streamline/online

Recovering Hard Drive Data

By J. on January 8, 2010 7:29 PM |
It was a lovely August morning when my TiBook went bye-bye forever.

I was busy prepping for a presentation when my laptop, which had been a semi-reliable friend for more than six years, shuffled off this mortal coil without even requesting last rites.  I'm no newbie when it comes to assisting electronics as they limp along toward their graves (my graduate assistantship was in electronic music, for goodness sake), so you can take my word for it when I say there was no hope.  None that would have made fiscal sense when compared with a new computer purchase, I mean.

And so I immediately slid over to the Apple web store and purchased a new 24" iMac.  It arrived a few days later.  (And it is, without a doubt, a beauty.  Particularly when compared with my "veteran" laptop.)  Alas, as I was cleaning my desk for its arrival, I made perhaps the most boneheaded move of my life: I picked up the 500GB G-Drive that held my file backups without first powering it down.  Yep, you guessed it.  The bad boy kicked like a handgun as the heads slammed into the spinning platters.  Double-oops.

As you might imagine, I was concerned.  I did have one ray of hope, however.  I was fairly certain the TiBook failure was an electronics issue and not another catastrophic hard drive failure.  I crossed my fingers that I might coax the old laptop drive contents onto my new desktop machine.  Luckily, I turned out to be right.

I hopped over to Best Buy and purchased a Rocketfish 2.5" drive enclosure.  Well, purchased isn't honestly the correct term.  Instead, I utilized what we Once Upon A Time--in a former life as a Radio Shack employee nearly twenty years ago--termed a "30-day free rental."  (If you can't deduce how this might work, shoot me an email.)  The Rocketfish worked like a charm, and all my files were safely on the new machine.  Replacing the guts in the G-Drive and my new backup strategy are topics for another day, however.

I'm torn over what I should do with the TiBook's carcass.  This is the first time I've ever replaced a dead Mac; all my other purchases were upgrades.  I had planned to set up all my old computers--from my Atari 800XL to the TiBook--in the Hobby Room of our new home.  I'm certain I can get my old LCIII (I'd like to use her as a central system for my model railroad) and PowerMac 5200 (perhaps for HyperCard programming and use as a household X10 system) humming again, but the TiBook seems beyond hope.  For now, she's tucked away in my laptop bag, until I buy her replacement.

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Simplification? No way, Jose.

By J. on April 30, 2007 10:55 AM |

Hard driveWell, this weekend was certainly a mess.  I am not even certain where to begin.

The hard drive on my laptop--which is my primary computer--had been acting suspicious since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) a while back.  The SBOD would start as the drive went through repeated and rapid chug-chug-chug-chug-pause cycles for up to several minutes.  The computer was unusable during this time.  The Activity Monitor provided absolutely no clues. Occasionally, I would have to force the Mac to shut down by holding the power button for several seconds.  I didn't know what was going on; it was an intermittent, new, and extremely frustrating problem.

I considered the following possibilities:

(1) I had acquired some sort of mal-ware without my knowledge (this seemed highly improbable);
(2) Some new third-party app or extension was poorly written or too drive-dependent (this also seemed unlikely, as I was disabling software left and right with no improvement);
(3) Something--software or the new OS--was wonking up the drive on a regular basis (verifying the disk, repairing permissions, and clearing the cache files regularly seemed to help things);
(4) The new OS implemented more background processes that required intensive hard drive access (for all I knew, Spotlight was busy indexing files, or virtual memory was swapping scratch files, or... you get the idea);
(5) There was a hardware problem (which I was very reluctant to admit, since I had just replaced the laptop's hard drive about two years ago).

I had been investigating possibilities with little success (see 3, above) when the annoyance caused me to do more searching Saturday morning.  Unhappily, I discovered the problem was symptomatic of a disk that is developing bad sectors.  I read lengthy trouble-shooting documents and decided to implement a cure, of sorts:

(1) I used Backup to (I believed) transfer all of my apps, library items, and user folders over to the 0.5TB G-Drive I added to my system a while back (nearly half a million files, so this was no short task);
(2) I attempted to erase the drive and Zero Out All Data on the drive.

Both of these were catastrophic.  Erasing the drive did not work.  Disk Utility estimated 16 minutes to completely zero out the entire 40GB drive, but apparently wasn't anticipating all the bad sectors.  From what I had read, when erasing a drive with bad sectors in this manner, Disk Utility is supposed to mark the bad sectors as unusable, allowing the remainder of the disk to function as normal.  However, I left the computer to this task all night and by morning (more than ten hours after I had started the process), Disk Utility still had not made it through half the disk.

It was at this point that I decided the drive was a lost cause and needed to be replaced.  No problem; I ran over to Best Buy, grabbed a new 80GB drive for just under $100, popped it in, and set Backup to restoring my files.

Oops, Backup didn't copy my entire Home folder.  What makes the matter worse is that I specifically checked after Saturday's backup to confirm all the files I had intended to transfer were copied into the archive.  But there it was, staring me in the face: the applications were there, my son's directory was there, but my entire Home directory was missing from the list of files.  I rightly began to panic.  Then it occurred to me that I could probably salvage some of these files from the other backup plans I had been running.  So I started restoring, plan by plan.

When all was said and done, I managed to recover (probably) about half of my files.  You see, Backup has this odd scheme for selecting what will be archived.  For example, you can select the packet titled (something to the effect of) "Back up all Keynote presentations."  I assume Backup scans the entire drive for Keynote files, then archives them.  As a result, I have some complete folders saved (folders that I had specifically marked for backup), and all the files of a certain type (for instance, all my Word documents).  But many things were never backed up at all, apparently.

To compound the issue, Backup apparently hadn't run a scheduled nightly/weekly back up of my files since a month ago.  This one still has me scratching my head.  Of course, when I purchased the new drive and installed the new OS, I also installed a new version of Backup, so I will assume the new plans I've created will run as scheduled.  For now.

Anyway, all of this basically boils down to the fact that I have lost innumerable files (many of which I certainly won't realize have been lost until I need them and go looking) totaling perhaps hundreds of man-hours of work.  Currently, I am most angry over the loss of my new web site design, which I had hand-coded in HTML and CSS but not yet copied to my server.  Poof.  Gone.  Am I kidding myself believing that anyone's life can actually be made simpler by use of technology?

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