Definitely cursed

image copyright of Ars TechnicaAfter the Wii near miss and the lost sunglasses episodes, the events of this weekend do not come as a shock to me anymore…

I came to Japan with my trusty 15″ Powerbook and an external 250GB Firewire 800 drive. I never found the time to set up the hard-drive around the house, so since I wasn’t using it at the time, I lent it to a friend for a couple of weeks to use as a vessel for transferring his data from his old PC to his new MacBook. He ended up keeping it 4-5 months and gave it back to me 2 weeks ago.

So this Sunday, I decided on a whim to plug it in and finally use it to store all the TV shows I download. Once setup, first thing I did was launch a backup of my data since I was wary of a drive failure like the one that happened to me 2 years ago (where I miraculously save my data by putting the drive in the freezer).

… That’s when it happened… 5 minutes in the backup, the OS freezed, the little whine of the internal 3.5″ 100GB drive disappearing. My HD had just died on me.

So thanks to my friend Jon who provided me with an OSX Tiger DVD, I’m now running from a system installed on the external drive. It looks like I should be able to rescue most of my data but I’ll have to wait 2 weeks until I can go to a friend’s house with all the tools I need to change the drive.

2 thoughts on “Definitely cursed”

  1. But… hey! after some downtimes come the good times!!
    (got to recognize some of the bad stuff is your fault, isn’t it?)

  2. Something similar happened to me last year.
    If traditional data rescue doesn’t give you much result (often the case, if there are some physical defect on your HD that make it die in the middle of recovery), you want to try and use ‘dd_rescue’… It’s a unix command-line utility that will make as perfect a mirror-copy of your HD as it can, leaving “holes” where it cannot. Once you’ve made such an image and loaded it on a healthy drive, you recovery is that much easier.

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