Re-solidified (?)

Since my last post was “Meltdown,” I guess that’s an apropos title, since everything is back up and running. The final diagnosis for the desktop: simple drive corruption. Thankfully, I don’t have to buy a new drive! I have no idea how it got corrupted, since as it was going south, I was in front of it doing nothing special, but I ran several utilities that stressed the hell out of the drive (writing 1s and 0s randomly in all sorts of patterns covering the disk multiple times) and nary an error was reported.

Unfortunately, I was not able to recover all the data. Between data recovery efforts and backups, I got more than 80-90% of everything, and I’d say that almost everything that was important (since I backup that stuff more often) is still with me. It was a classic case of diminishing returns: the first day of full-on effort yielded by far the most data, the second day a bit more stuff but at far greater time and effort, and by Day 3, I had to just chalk the remainder up as a loss. I had a HUGE project at work that required me to work almost all day this last Sunday (another reason I hadn’t updated), so I didn’t have oodles of time to burn with my system in lala land.

The laptop was obviously fine from the start after I wiped it clean since its problems were always more superficial and was a result of my being overcautious than anything. It was “home base” for everything and turned out to be a trooper. What was massively cool is that my MPB has an 80G drive–adequate but small by laptop standards nowadays. It has one Firewire port which was connected to my desktop, which has two physical internal drives. The freaking awesome cool thing I had never tried in target mode is hot-connecting more physical drives to the slave machine. In this case, I added two more external FW drives to the G5, so my wittle bitty Macbook now had 5 physical drives mounted for a total of 880G of total raw space at its disposal!! Mwahahaha!

Ok, enough geekery, I promise. I just wanted to post a quick update before the posts that are about to go up because I got some comments (thank you) and wanted to bring the minimelodrama full circle.

Meltdown

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!