Meltdown

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

I have had a complete and total computer meltdown today.  I finally got my hands on the new version of MacOS X 10.5, “Leopard.”  Since I’m overly-cautious, I decided to put it on my MacBook Pro since it has very little “unique” data that was easy to back up first.  The update hosed it.  My usernames were gone and other esoteric problems had myself spending way too much time in single-user mode.  I doubt I would have had any semblance of a system left if it weren’t for my existing UNIX-y skillz.

To make this part of the long story short, I got it working…sort-of.  It’s the same in medicine–you know something is wrong, but all the labs say things are fine–except in medicine you can’t say, “OK, we’re going to just erase you and start from scratch.” LOL!  I was reading articles online on my desktop to help w/the laptop situation, and then–after the laptop is pretty much behaving oddly enough to say “screw it, I’m wiping it,”–my desktop started chunking. There was no noise, but the fan started revving and the CPU seemed pegged.  It took seconds just to switch windows, probably a minute to switch to a different app, and just general badness. When I looked at the system logs, all I saw was “I/O error” over and over, and it corresponded to my boot disk–you know, the one that has a bunch of important stuff on it.

Booting from install CDs to run disk utilities was an exercise in futility. 2 out of 3 times, I couldn’t get the disk to even be recognized.  It was then that I had my “Oh shit!” moment: thanks to the laptop fiasco I realized I had no working computer to fall back on.  The cruel irony that sadistically played out in my head over and over was that I intentionally left my G5 alone, pristine because information on it was too important until Leopard proved its spots.  My karmic fortune makes me wonder if I clubbed harbor seals in a former life.  

Besides sharing my woe (and on the 31st, no less), the other important update is that I had no less than 5 blog drafts >90% completed to post.  One of them was on MRSA, another was on emergency medicine….it sucks that I lost all that work, but that’s still not even the worst of it.  I am still trying some voodoo to see if I can at least salvage some recent data, if I can even get the sucker to mount. (don’t mind the goat skull on my CPU and the salt circle on the floor)  I do have backups, but my iTunes library alone is >40G, so it gets kinda hard sometimes.  I might have lost everything in the last 7-10 days in terms of documents, collected data, bits and pieces, etc., but I have a 2nd internal drive which stores most of my multimedia (Aperture for digital photos, some video movie projects, etc.).

So as to not lie on the bed crying like a girl, I remind myself that I’m not a graphic designer that lost his entire portfolio and will affect his financial future; this was not a case where my groundbreaking research into blah-blah went up in digital smoke.  I have a reasonable collection of backups across different external drives, but it’s going to be a major pain in the ass to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty together again (and where to get another sATA drive of any decent size down here w/o paying practically double price).  

One step at a time….more soon…    BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA! 

• 

  By Zac, November 2, 2007 @ 11:20 pm

  Ay vey, I feel for you Enrico. I’m playing the waiting game at this point with my external hard drive… it’s my only backup of all my data, and I know one of these days it’s going to crap out on me. Then again, spending an extra $100 in the midst of all this debt is really hard to justify.
• 

  By Castillonis, November 3, 2007 @ 11:52 am

  Enrico,
  Place your drive in a ziploc plastic bag and put it in the freezer for about 24 hours. Have an external USB or firewire drive connected and copy you important data. You may get 20-45 minutes to copy important files. Though, this doesn’t always work.
• 

  By claudia, November 4, 2007 @ 6:19 pm

  Call geek squad…just kidding, you handled the meltdown well. I am impressed you got to recover so much. Good job, but enough with your problems- why wont my right arrow key work!
• 

  By enrico, November 7, 2007 @ 10:28 pm

  Zac: I hear ya man. I always want a backup of the backup, in a perfect world. When things are so damn big now (multimedia, etc.) it’s not as easy to depend on optical media. I’m oldskool and love digital tape–it’s cheap media and you can have multiple copies in several locations. It’s just that the demand in the consumer market is near zero for a unidirectional backup/recover solution (ie, people can’t “mount” tape and just drag a file to the desktop). As a result, the only gear avail. are built to the spec of enterprise, not personal backup needs, and cost thousands.

  All I can tell you is to baby and pamper that drive. Tell her it’s the only one; it’s just you and her, and lavish it with attention (regular verify scans, catching any small issues before they become big ones). When the time comes, dump her and upgrade. LOL! (I kid, I kid…)
• 

  By Sid Schwab, November 13, 2007 @ 9:24 pm

  Well, this is chilling. I’d been thinking about getting Leopard for my macbook. Now, not so much. Ironically, one of the attractions is the new backup/recovery capabilities. And my geekery consists mainly of restarting when things don’t work right. If you had trouble, I’d be screwed, and the meltdown would likely extend to my brain, rendering me permanently fried.

Other Links to this Post

1. Trusted.MD Network — November 20, 2007 @ 8:37 am