Dead Ink Vinyl

Last week I was fighting with Mail.app, which was crashing on startup. It would launch — I could see the main window for a moment — then it would die and CrashReporter would give me the usual “Send to Apple?” dialog box.

I tried lots of tactics to recover Mail.app. Removing the Preferences file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist) fixed the issue, but I lost all of my Mailboxes, which was unacceptable. I run Mail.app with the preview pane expanded, and the timing of the crash suggested that it may be related to rendering the default highlighted email message. I tried to locate the specific preferences controlling the default highlighted message, but was unsuccessful.

I then formulated various Google queries until I had created one that got me a useful answer. Holding down the Shift key while launching Mail.app suppresses the Preview feature (no messages are highlighted by default). When I launched Mail.app in this way, it did not crash. When I clicked on the suspect message with the preview pane extended, the application crashed. Clicking on other messages did not crash the application. Thus, I solved the problem by launching Mail.app while holding the Shift key, hid the preview pane, selected the message, deleted it, and emptied the Deleted messages.

I then setup Backup.app (from my .Mac membership) with a daily backup plan for Mail.app to ~/Backups/ and a weekly plan to CD or DVD. The plans include:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
~/Library/Mail/
~/Library/Mail Downloads/

I hope this information helps others.

I am writing this entry from my newly upgraded PowerBook with a 7200rpm 100GB hard disk. I have pictures to prove the tale — I’ll post them later. The PowerBook works like a charm. I love it so far. The computer certainly boots faster than ever and launches multiple applications simultaneously faster than ever. I haven’t put the PB through its paces yet, though.

Anyway, I want to thank the team at PB FixIt — they did a great job with their walk through. Their instructions were dead-on for disassembling my laptop.

I would add just three small items to those who may follow in my footsteps. The first item sounds pretty brain-dead, but is easy enough to forget as a PowerBook owner: shutdown the laptop before starting. This is worth mentioning because as a Mac user I’ve grown so comfortable with the Sleep mode that I think “sleep = off”. The other thing I would note is on page 6: the orange cables are disconnected from the motherboard by pulling straight up. I didn’t enjoy having to guess at something like that with a very expensive motherboard at stake. Finally, the guide needs to mention that when you’re attaching the upper case (keyboard, trackpad, et al) you want to make sure the trackpad ribbon (from page 3) is properly positioned through its slot or you won’t be able to reach it when it’s time to plug it back in.

And you need to plug in the “trackpad ribbon”. It turns out that the “trackpad ribbon” isn’t just for the trackpad. It’s for everything on the upper case that needs to talk with the motherboard: keyboard, trackpad, and power button. I happened to have missed this step and my PowerBook was a brick when I was done assembling it. A brick. A paperweight. It didn’t work. It didn’t start. It didn’t do anything. I pressed the power button and… nothing. Not a whir, a light, nor a chirp. Absolute nothing. It is a very eerie sensation, followed by a little bit of panic. I did figure out pretty quickly that I’d skipped a step in my rush to enjoy my new system, and then discovered that I had to go all the way back to pulling off the upper case to fix my oversight. I hope I’ve saved you that trouble. Now you know what to look for first if your PowerBook won’t start after a hard drive replacement or upgrade.

I dropped the old 80GB disk into a MacAlly 2.5″ Firewire enclosure. The enclosure really impresses me. I also own standard size enclosure from MacAlly and I think very highly of both products. The 2.5″ is a really solid piece of work. I read some reviews that bad-mouthed it because it doesn’t come with a DC power adapter, which is needed when running from USB. However, the drive does come with a second USB cable that plugs into the DC power port, so you just need to plug that into a powered USB port to pull the necessary power to run the drive. (Since USB sucks, it doesn’t bother to provide enough power on its own.) Of course, if you simply use the Firewire connector, all the necessary power is pulled from that and you don’t need to fool with any of this USB nonsense.

I booted from a different Firewire drive that had an old image of my main disk, then used SuperDuper! to clone the old 80GB drive onto the new 100GB drive and rebooted. (I’m aware of CCC, but I find SuperDuper! sufficiently superior to CCC that I’m willing to pay for the utility.)

Let me get right to it: do not purchase ACOM Data hard drives! I picked up two USB2/Firewire 80GB 7200RPM drives very inexpensively at CompUSA about a year ago and I can say that the fans used are incredibly shoddy.

I had the drives hooked up to my LinkSys NSLU2 NAS controller. I love the NSLU2. It’s a sub-$100 NAS device that provides permission-based SMB (Windows file sharing) access to two USB2.0 hard drives. It is very small, runs Linux, and is very easy to control.

Anyway, I had the two ACOM Data drives attached to the NSLU2. I didn’t trust the drives, so I setup the NSLU2 to use one as a backup drive for the other. I dumped all kinds of content onto the NAS to be shared between my Dell (WinXP) and PowerBook (MacOSX) computers. Since both computers are locked-down and running their own firewalls, it’s next to impossible to get them to share files directly. Thus, the NAS filer is a very nice solution.

The fan died on the first ACOM Data drive several months ago. Cracking the hard drive’s case is next to impossible without breaking everything (it’s all plastic without screws), so left the drive for dead. A month ago the other drive’s fan gave out. I picked up a nice LaCie drive to replace the two ACOM duds. Now I attempting to get the data off the old drive and onto the new one.

Here is where the Linux under-pinnings of the NSLU2 became a liability. The NSLU2 uses the EXT3 filesystem common to Linux. It’s a great filesystem, but I happen to no longer have a Linux workstation or server in my residence. I could plug both drives into the NSLU2 and use its interface to copy over the contents, but I would like more fine-grain control over the process to copy the most important content first. That’s the degree to which I distrust the ACOM Data drive lasting through the operation.

I thought I was in good shape because I have a KNOPPIX 3.7 CD. I’d never used it, but I’d read such good things about it… Well, it doesn’t boot on my Dell box. It gets past the LILO prompt and starts recognizing hardware, but it quickly kernel panics that it cannot read init. Hmph. I’m grabbing build 02 of 3.7, which may work better. In the mean time, I am fanning the flame of hope that I’ll find a way to read EXT3 under MacOSX. I’m giving Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem a shot.