My hard drive story - Printable Version

My hard drive story - Printable Version

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My hard drive story - mikebw - 03-20-2006

this is sort of long-winded, I'm stuck at work with nothing else to do, just a warning.

Like most people here, I have a thing for buying hard drives. I was considering the CUSA 250GB SATA for $60 A/R deal on saturday night, but I was having trouble justifying it.
I already have (2) 160GB SATA's in my G5, along with another 160GB PATA on top of the superdrive for my mp3's. I also have a 250GB FW800 external drive (OWC mercury elite pro) for long-term backups.
SO, in view of all this I decided to evaluate just how much space I really need, I mean do I have enough space to backup everything? I hooked up my 250GB FW drive to do some backups since it had been a while. I get it pretty full, down to 80GB left, then I decide to backup all my music, all 65GB worth. Then the whole computer freezes. great. I restart and it seems okay, but then the finder locks up again.
Time to find my tech CD's. I find the applecare TechTool CD first. I just wanted to run disk warrior, but I couldn't find that so in goes tech tool. I do a full scan which takes forever, and it says I have bad blocks on the drive (double great). It tries to fix but to no avail. I restart and I get the official 'your computer needs to be restarted' error screen. BS. I try again, and again, same thing.
So now I'm thinking the whole drive is hosed since it will not boot from it, luckily it was not that bad.
I decide I really want to run disk warrior but I need to boot from another drive... my #2 160GB internal drive! I install 10.3 on it, then copy disk warrior over and run it on the #1 drive. I get something to the effect of "your drive is beyond repair, HAHA". Now I have applecare but I don't 'call' apple for help, and I really don't want to have to replace this drive, warranty or not.
So I decide to backup the entire drive, all 118GB worth of data, onto my 250GB FW drive. It only had 80GB free, so I delete a few non-essential folders, some older incremental backups and I set Carbon Copy Cloner to the task of writing a Disk image of my main drive to the backup drive. This all takes quite some time.
Once I have the disk image I am still not feeling 100% sure about reformatting the main drive, so I double-backup a few of the most important things to the 2nd drive, then I reformat the main. NOTE, you have to write ALL ZEROS to the drive if you hope to fix any 'bad blocks' problem. This takes quite some time, and then I have to verify with tech tool that it is okay, which also takes some time.
Finally, it passed the surface scan, and I restore the main drive from the disk image using Disk Utility. Very easy although it was another while before that finished.
So in the end, I basically backed up everything, TWICE, and in the process reformatted my main drive and somehow got back to exactly where I started, minus the bad blocks.

So a happy ending, if you are still reading this. The lesson? Backups are good, even if they cause you to stumble onto some pre-existing errors and consume several hours of your weekend. So what about the CUSA drive deal? I'm still undecided... Now that I have a full image of my main drive on a backup I feel very secure, but the backup is basically full now, only 12GB left. So I want another backup drive, but that means another case, and do I go eSATA or stick with FW 800? And do I really want to invest in a drive as 'small' as 250 when I really need something like 400? Bah! I love computers... Wink

Re: My hard drive story - BigGuynRusty - 03-20-2006

My GAWD wake me when it's over!
Can you boil it down to two sentences?

BGnR
P.S., you could prescribe the post above to insomnia patients instead of Ambien!

My hard drive story, the abridged version - mikebw - 03-20-2006

I had some bad blocks on my boot drive.
I fixed it, and didn't loose any data.

yea!

Re: My hard drive story - M>B> - 03-20-2006

That is two sentences!

Excluding the "yea!"

Re: My hard drive story - WHiiP - 03-20-2006

Have you checked the back ups to make sure they are "good"???????

Big Grin

Re: My hard drive story - modelamac - 03-20-2006

BGnR, he warned you.

"this is sort of long-winded, I'm stuck at work with nothing else to do, just a warning."

What is there about that you didn't understand? If your comment was tongue in cheek, it didn't come across that way to all.

Re: My hard drive story - BigGuynRusty - 03-20-2006

modelamac Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> BGnR, he warned you.
>
> "this is sort of long-winded, I'm stuck at work
> with nothing else to do, just a warning."
>
> What is there about that you didn't understand?
> If your comment was tongue in cheek, it didn't
> come across that way to all.

Another long winded poster, please show me this later when I need to sleep!
Some folks just don't get humor, you have to put a HUGE sticker with flashing lights.

BGnR

Re: My hard drive story - WHiiP - 03-20-2006

BigGuynRusty Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some folks just don't get humor, you have to put a
> HUGE sticker with flashing lights.

( Big Grin

(

Re: My hard drive story - BigGuynRusty - 03-20-2006

WHiiP Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> BigGuynRusty Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Some folks just don't get humor, you have to
> put a
> > HUGE sticker with flashing lights.

EXACTLY WHiPsterBill!

BGnR

Re: My hard drive story - sscutchen - 03-20-2006

Mikebw---

You might think about getting a G5Bracket and installing additional SATA drives inside your G5. I've got 3 drives on my bracket. I bought a FirmTek SATA PCI-x card to get to'em.

I have a boot drive and a media drive, each with image backups, and a scratch drive. I also have an external FW drive which has backups from my other two Macs.