My iBook made it all the way from Suzhou, China to my doorstep last night, courtesy of our friend Sara and her educational discount. It’s white, it smells like new fresh plastic, and it looks beautiful. I booted it up, it walked me through the migration process (Firewire Target Disk Mode is awesome), and within about 45 minutes I was pulling email down from my server on a familiar desktop, where all my files and contact information were in their rightful, normal place. The iBook sync’ed up with my phone in five minutes. That’s about the best result anybody could ever hope for.
However, an attempted upgrade to Movabletype 3.2 didn’t go as well as planned. Hopefully everything is functioning normally again as of 12:30PM after a cleanup of my cgi directory; I’m going to have to follow some better directions than the ones supplied by Sixapart and do the whole thing over again.
There’s a new 14″ iBook heading my way, as of last night. I don’t know what to do with myself.
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.
I got a pile of spam from some asshat—”aaa@aaa.com”, at 68.23.148.214—linking to a bunch of shitty epinions and other ad sites today. This was on top of two other douchebags who tried to game my site to link back to someplace else earlier in the day. Stephen had written something a few weeks back about installing a plugin for MT called spamlookup, which promises to help screen comments whenever the shit starts flying. I don’t use Trackbacks, which is one reason, I think, that I haven’t been hit harder in the past, but I guess it’s only a matter of time for everything. I’ll report back when I see some results (if any.)
Update: I got eighteen more hits from this same dick over the course of the last 12 hours, from varying IP addresses. Spamlookup only caught one, which looked different from the rest.
Apple just updated the Mac Mini—$600 will get you 1.42GHz, Bluetooth, 512MB of RAM, Airport Extreme, and a combo drive (I’ve already got a burner in a tower.) The iBooks got pretty much the same configuration, but the 14″ model has a SuperDrive.
That right there is just a no-brainer. Now, I have to figure out which one I need worse….
Here’s one of the first of the B/W 620 pictures I had developed last week. There’s a bunch on Flickr right now (which is unfortunately pig-dog slow this morning) with more to come as I scan and clean them up. I’m thrilled with the results, although I’m hoping that they develop a little darker than they scanned. The camera did an incredible job—there’s a bit of blur around the outer edges of the frame, but that adds a little character, in my opinion.
I’ll upload more pictures as I scan them. As you might guess, it’s time-intensive, and this weekend we had our hands full.