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.
Whoa. Dude. I am soooo sorry this is happening to y’all.
I have some of your music archived. I confess I’ve listened to it once or twice, but it has been safely stored off-site as you requested for just such an event. For the rest of it, all I can do is wince in sympathy and join you in that horribly uncomfortable feeling that is twisting your gut into a pretzel.
It makes the whole burning all of my files to DVD a few weeks back that much more of a blessed event than I’d originally realized. I’m taking back all of my cursing about it being burned haphazardly and just thanking the Christ that we got it off there before this happened.
Let me know if there’s anything else you need me to be doing for you.