Dead Hard Drive [Updated]
Ugh. I lost my PB’s hard drive an hour ago. It wasn’t recoverable. OSX froze, which I got miffed about, but when I rebooted the system it shutdown after a long time on the cycling progress circle. Repeated attempts resulted in the same behavior. I pulled out my backup external drive, booted from it, and ran Disk Utility. It tried to repair one file that was reported to be 155TB in size (by setting it to be 0 bytes in size), but that generated a hardware error. The drive could not be erased, either — another hardware error. Finally, I tried repartitioning the drive. That fixed it. Of course, all my data is gone. My last full disk backup was at the end of Februrary. I have a recent-enough backup of my documents and of my mail, but I’ve forever lost some really great photos I took on Friday from my flight lesson and I’ll have to re-purchase some content from iTunes. Of course, I don’t know which content from iTunes was purchased in the last three weeks, except for the Battlestar Galactica episodes.
Grumble, grumble.
So, I’m going to SuperDuper! my backup boot drive to my laptop’s hard drive, then use Backup.app to recover my email, which I had just backed up minutes before the crash. Wish me luck.
Updated 13-Mar-2006 12:15am: Apple’s Backup.app recovered my documents and mail without a hitch. Except that, apparently, it made an incremental backup of my mail to DVD even though it could have made a full backup (it was an empty disk), so I was prompted for the previous DVD backup I’d made to get the process started. I had it, no biggie, but still: feh!
