Yesterday I did a bunch of research into resurrecting blowed-up disks and found some excellent advice on making a bootable CD with disk utilities for resurrecting/repairing/recovering a drive. Following the directions, I used BootCD to build a disk image with some repair utilities and burn it to CD. I started the machine last night with the CD (BootCD does an excellent job—I highly recommend it), and ran DiskWarrior again, with minimal results—whatever I did to it, this disk is toast. I decided to settle for recovery, and ran Data Rescue X overnight to scan the entire disk thoroughly. This morning, it presented a detailed report of the entire disk and several options for recovery, which is a godsend. We may lose some files, but it looks like the majority (knocking on wood) are still present and accounted for; I just need to get them off the drive and onto a clean disk.

Update:

The secondary (newly built) disk I’d copied all the original data onto looks to be in reasonable shape. I threw it in a FireWire enclosure and it popped right up on the desktop of my powerbook, which is is a Good Thing. I’m going to wait until I get my hands on the new iBook with a Superdrive, buy about 50 DVD-R’s, and back the whole thing up manually.

In a chain of events starting with the demise of a perfectly healthy G4 tower, we’ve been operating with some sick equipment here in the office at Idiot Central. After that tower died, I picked up a used G3 and transplanted the drive, thinking it would get us through until we could purchase a better machine.

Some flaky behavior and odd crashing convinced me that this was the wrong tack to take, so I freed up another drive, formatted it cleanly, and installed a happy new operating system. The other night, I daisy-chained both drives inside the tower and transferred about 100GB of information—pictures, music, application files, freelance files, etc. onto the new drive, and rebooted.

Neither drive wanted to come up, so I popped in DiskWarrior to straighten out any problems with the drives. What I found last night is dire, indeed. DiskWarrior is choking on the volume of bad data on the (originally fine) disk, and it can’t make heads or tails of the “new” disk. I have a few options at this point: Freak out, which is why I’m sitting here writing this and not screaming at the wall, call drivesavers, which by some accounts can cost upwards of $2,500 (and I don’t like the idea of sending my disk away to a company with no available privacy policy), or just quietly give up and start over from scratch.

I don’t know what happened, or how this got so bad so quickly. I didn’t do anything I haven’t done before, like opening the case and switching drives around, or resetting jumpers. I’m stumped, and frustrated and scared, because this represents a significant amount of our history in peril. (All our pictures prior to 2005 are backed up and fine. All my freelance work is based off my Powerbook. The majority of our application copies are backed up. But the music collection…oh, crap. And I’m sure I’m forgetting other important data that could be gone forever.)

There are actually a few more options I have in the home-remedy area; TechTool and Drive10 are available, as well as some other utilities that may be sucessful in tandem with DiskWarrior. I’m going to try them first and see if I can’t get the data off this disk before I really panic severely.

I didn’t need this.

This morning, my powerbook didn’t wake up from sleep. Hitting the Power button didn’t restart it either. I popped the keyboard up to see if anything was whirring inside (It’s had the strange habit sometimes of waking from sleep but not sending power to the screen, easily remedied by closing the lid and waiting for it to go to sleep again) and got a lovely whiff of burning hot electronic components. Thinking the old girl had finally given up the ghost, I began to panic, realize I had no current backup strategy for my email. Before completely freaking out, though, I pulled the battery and replaced it with one of the spares on my desk, and tried the power button. Thankfully, the Mac startup chime rang out and disaster was averted.

Given the fact that I’m planning on that new iBook next week, though, I think she’s trying to send me a signal.