03-20-2006, 06:38 AM
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...
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...