Dead Ink Vinyl

I should share that I did not have luck using ext2fsx (ext2 support for MacOSX) to read my drive formatted (as ext3) by my Linksys NSLU2. However, other people report success using this utility for this purpose (see batbox.org on 10-Jul-2004), so I may have been hasty. In the “I just want it to work” mentality into which I’m growing, I gave up and plugged the old drive and new drive into the NSLU2 and let it do the synchronization. The old drive lasted long enough to get its contents copied off, but the noise was teeth grating.

I have left the extension installed on my laptop and have not suffered any instability or problems as a result. And I like the idea of being able to read Linux partitions from my laptop in a crunch.

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.