tech: May 2006 Archives

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Yesterday we took a trip to Best Buy over lunch. I came out with a new internal 250GB hard drive (I probably needed to do that anyway as I had about 10% free on the old one) and a 500GB external drive.

By the time I got home, Chris had installed Tiger on the new hard drive, had done all the updates, and had moved the old hard drive down.

I was able to copy all the preferences and files over from my other hard drive, so now it's just a matter of re-installing fresh copies of all the applications.

I had hoped to have posted pictures from last weekends wedding by now, but instead I've been trying to save the pictures from last weekend. And the weekend before, and well, for the last 6 years.

After a routine security update and other patches were downloaded and installed, I rebooted, launched a few applications and began replying to an e-mail message. After the first word was typed, nothing else could be typed as an error message stating the dictionary could not be accessed would pop up. Okay, this seems a little odd. So I quit Mail and tried to relaunch, it wouldn't relaunch, hmmm, time to re-boot. Only problem, it wouldn't reboot!

So as it's sitting there at the start-up screen for minutes on end, the fan getting louder and louder, I call in the husband (aka: the man who can fix all computer problems). We pull the plug and try it again. Same thing. He deduces I might have had a hard drive failure. Panic sets in. So 2000-2005 have been archived to CD or DVD, but what about 2006? All my zoo pictures (see below) gone? The wedding pictures, gone? Why oh why do I delete the card upon downloading the pictures to the computer.

We found this nifty little thing on Apple's website, if you enter the serial number, it lets you see how much longer your warranty is good for. July 2006, phew, we're still covered under warranty. So I call Apple tech support. Hmmm, you only get 90 days free tech support unless you buy the extended Apple Care warranty. Hardware is covered for a year, but only 90 days of support. The guy I spoke to was nice enough to help me locate the support articles on the website that would walk me (us) through a few trouble shooting steps without paying him $50 to solve the problem. I seriously thought about buying the apple care. I still might as I'm not planning on getting rid of the computer any time soon.

So we did the basic running disk utility type things, then we figured out how to see the boot-up log instead of the spinning rainbow disk. Which is how we found that it was hanging on not being able to find the root user. Chris tried to work some magic, but was unable to fix it.

Since it looks like the easiest, best thing to do at this point is to rebuild the drive from scratch, the next step was figuring out how to get the data off. After some brainstorming, I said too bad it wasn't a laptop and we could boot it into target disk mode. Well, we decided to try it, and sure enough target disk mode worked.

Copying 120 GB of data is a daunting process. The current set up is my G5 desktop in target disk mode connected to my G4 iBook via firewire. And Chris' external USB 2.0 hard drive also connected to my iBook. Little by little I've been copying parts of the G5 hard drive to the external hard drive through my iBook. A relief. As long as I copy the pertinent files, I won't loose any data. However, both my macs have been tied up for 2 days in the copying process (start one set in the morning as I'm leaving for work and one in the evening and then I forget about it).

This weekend's project: making sure all my data is off the G5 hard drive and rebuilding the G5. Fun!

Moral of the story: Make sure your data is backed up!