Dropped Powerbook
8:39 PM 1/7/2005 – Glimpse of Hope
After about half an hour, Erin walks back into the living room to see how the computer is doing, hoping that her boyfriend who is on the brink of jumping, will cheer up with some good news. “Waiting form mysql server 4.0” she calls out. Excitedly, I run into the room.
Sure enough we have made past the gray screen and are now on the good ol’ blue screen with the boot dialog window showing. This is good right? Well, yes, but why has it taken so long to get this far. Now it says it is starting Apache. I start and stop Apache so many times each day, I know it shouldn’t take this long. Dejected, I turn off the computer and suggest we go get some dinner.
10:17 PM 1/7/2005 – Fed and Boozed
After dinner, which consisted of a Creole Burger at Brewvies (rather than the Chipotle Pork Sandwich in which I had my heart set on – par for the course today), I booted it up once more to see if the “rest” had helped any. It hadn’t. Imagine that.
Time to sleep. More tomorrow.
8:03 AM 1/8/2005 – A New Day – Time to Dig In
I can’t sleep anymore. Everytime that I stir, I begin thinking of my ailing laptop in the other room. Time to search the web for “Dropped Powerbook” and hope to find more than this blog.
10:12 AM 1/8/2005 – Disk Utility
After a cursory search on google for similar problems, I find that the disk that was included with the Powerbook includes Disk Utility. Now how to boot from CD on a mac.
1. Put the CD in the drive. 2. Restart computer. 3. After boot “gong”, hold down ‘c’ until you see the gray apple logo. Check out these other cool mac keyboard shortcuts.
Ok, that was easy enough. But it looks like it is trying to install OS X again. No, I am trying to save my data not overwrite it. At least I know how to do that if it comes to it later though (fingers crossed).
4. Look on ‘Installer’ on the menu bar. 5. Click on ‘Disk Utility’
There, made it. I am so anxious. First, I verify the disk. That doesn’t work and it returns a message saying that I need to ‘Repair the Disk’. Ok, there is a nice little button that says ‘Repair Disk’. I click it and after a few minutes, it says that it is unable to repair this disk. Arrrgh!
I tried verifying the disk permissions. This found a bunch of errors, but eventually hung, or at least looked like it. I tried repairing the disk permissions, and this also fixed a few and then hung. I imagine that is as far on the disk as it is able to get before it runs into the bad sector. I hope it isn’t too big and I wonder if they make something that will let me still use the good portion of my disk and just act like the bad sectors aren’t there. Hmmmm.
Time to go buy Sundance Tickets, get breakfast and make a stop by Mac Docs for a little advice on how to proceed.
1:13 PM 1/8/2005 – Mac Docs to the Rescue
Phew, I feel better. The guy at Mac Docs, sounds like it won’t be a huge deal, probably just a new hard drive. He said that all they do is run Disk Warrior and if that doesn’t work, Norton Systemworks, and if that doesn’t work, Tech Tools Pro 4. Sounds good, “how long will it take?” I ask. 5 days. Ick!. Erin and I head up to our local University Bookstore and pick up a copy of Disk Warrior, saving $20 with the academic discount – I love being a student. How will I ever be able to give this up?
1:30 PM 1/8/2005 – Time for Disk Warrior
I am home and have just started Disk Warrior. I first had to figure out how to eject the Apple CD since the eject button wouldn’t work as the system was currently bootted to that CD. So using those handy shortcuts previously mentioned, I found that instead of holding ‘c’ on boot, I just hold the eject button on boot, and voila, out comes the cd and in I put the Disk Warrior CD.
Once the system has booted the Disk Warrior CD, I select the ‘Macintosh HD’ and hit ‘Rebuild’.
1:40 PM 1/8/2005 – Uh oh!
The progress bar looks like it has stopped and a message just below the progress bar says ‘Speed Inhibited by Disk Malfunction’. Oh no. Is this going to freeze too? Well, after a quick search on the web as well as the help for Disk Warrior, this looks to be normal for damaged disks. I guess I will just have to wait.
2:44 PM 1/8/2005 – Off to Best Buy!
Going to redeem a christmas gift card and get some yummy compact flash. mmmmmm, compact flash. The bar still doesn’t look like it has moved. Maybe when I return.
4:27 PM 1/8/2005 – I’m Back – and Still Nothing
Back from Best Buy and a few other errands, and it is still “Locating Directory Data.”
4:52 PM 1/8/2005 – Time for a Little Tape
I put some tape on the progress bar so that it just covers the end. This way I will be able to tell if it ever moves.
11:20 PM 1/8/2005 – Still no progress…
Friends have come and gone. Still nothing. :(
9:23 AM 1/9/2005 – Yawn – still no progress…
I wake up sure to see some sort of progress, but no – nothing. I can hear the hard drive making a soft little ticking noise. “tick tick tick tududuh, tick tick tick tududuh.” I guess it is still working. Must be patient Daniel-son.
1:16 PM 1/9/2005 – Still nothing
¡Nada!
5:54 PM 1/9/2005 – Back from run and ….
Nothing. Still nothing. Hmmmm.
7:46 PM 1/9/2005 – Cancelling Disk Warrior
Well, I let Disk Warrior run for 30 hours and 16 minutes. Without some indicator that there is something actually happening, I have have decided to cancel it. I hope I can sell this program on Ebay. Oh well.
I did swing by Compusa and pick up a 160 GB external hard drive. Maybe I can install OS X on it and then browse the corrupted drive and copy enough of the programs over to satisfy me, then wipe that drive or replace it, whichever works.
And that’s all folks.
I was able to install OSX on the external hard drive and boot to that. Once in, I browsed to the corrupted drive and just started copying things over. Most things were fine. There were a few images that were corrupted, but nothing bad enough that I didn’t think it was worth it. Hell, I would say I managed to salvage about 97% of my personal data, i.e. stuff that lived in my home directory.
Once I copied everything over, I took my computer into Mac Docs and had them put in a new hard drive.
After getting that back, I copied my data over form the external hard drive, reinstalled my apps and I was back in business.
Lesson Learned
Laptops are just that… things that top your lap, not things to be left on table tops with cords strung about so innocent little dogs can accidentally cause you to lose a week recovering from a decision to lazily leave your trusted computer in a vulnerable position.
Oh and BACKUP EVERYTHING and BACKUP OFTEN.
Carbon Copy Cloner works great as does this article (if you are running tiger you can just use the built in rsync with the -E flag to handle the resource forks)
I currently use the following commands with my external drive connected.
sudo rsync -avE—progress—exclude-from ”/Users/treybean/rsync_excludes” / /Volumes/Backup/
and to make it bootable
sudo bless -folder /Volumes/Backup/System/Library/CoreServices/
