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Bad day, crash + lost backup

phillipjfry

phillipjfry

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 12, 2006
847
1
Peace in Plainfield
I had one helluva hard drive crash over the weekend, only to realize I cannot find my backup dvd with pictures archived as far back as 2000. :mad:

I think I am probably going to get an external hard drive this weekend, but after the crash, what's the point?
It started out with photo booth not turning on the built in isight. Then I logged out and into another account to see if it was only on my main account. Only, logging in and opening finder completely halted the computer and I had to force a restart. It would not boot past the blue screen (pardon my lack of OSX knowledge, its my first iMac), but it passed the grey screen with the black apple. Restarting with the install cd in and running the disk utility, it told me that my drive had an "Invalid Sibling Link" and I could not mount it, repair it, fsck_hfs it, Disk utility wouldn't work with it and by the time I had learned about diskwarrior, I had already given up, let my emotions get the best of me and just reinstalled. :(
If there is a lesson to be learned this weekend, I learned it. :(
 
And not to jump to precipitous action before stepping back and exploring the alternatives.

A better plan would have been to purchase the external Firewire drive, install an OS on THAT, and preserve the damaged drive for later recovery.
 
Nah, I'm not going to kick you when you're down. But the lesson to be learnt is not only the usual backup plan, but not letting your emotions rule the machine and reinstalling from the point of frustration. I can't tell you how many times I've had to re-apply repair methods only to have it work the third or fourth time.
 
Another great piece of software that can help recover dead drives not due to mechanical problems is Spin Rite.

On the bad side it requires a PC to use. You can launch via floppy or CD. All you need to do is remove your HD from your Mac and connect it to your PC.

Spin Rite is awesome. I've recovered both Mac and PC formated drives numerous times when nothing else would work. It is well worth the cost.

You can get it at CRG dot com
 
Why do you need a PC? Can't you just burn it onto a disk and boot from that? This is a relatively recent iMac we're talking about here (very recent actually, 24").
 
Killyp said:
Why do you need a PC? Can't you just burn it onto a disk and boot from that? This is a relatively recent iMac we're talking about here (very recent actually, 24").
Click to expand...
AFAIK, you cannot boot an Intel iMac from a CD to run Spin Rite. Spin Rite runs at a very low level and interacts with the HD directly. That is why it can work on just about any HD format out there.

On a side note, I have corresponded with the good folks at GRC with regards to them creating a Mac version. The current answer is no. The reason is that Steve Gibson does all his programming in assembly language which is why his projects are small and run fast. At this time, he does not have the time to develop a Mac version to run on the Intel MBs.

So until this changes, just connect the Mac HD to a PC and go from there.
 
Good news from the front
I remembered that I Had a backup of at least 70% of the photos that I lost on a server I built for a friend about 7 months ago. He still has it :)
70 > 0
I won't ever see my pictures from Defcon again :(
But I will still have some pictures back

Bad news:
My brand new 2gb flash drive that had everything else that was essential to me (resume, some often used programs, documents, etc) just fried last night. So one thing after another for me :p
 
phillipjfry said:
Bad news:
My brand new 2gb flash drive that had everything else that was essential to me (resume, some often used programs, documents, etc) just fried last night. So one thing after another for me :p
Click to expand...
Sorry to hear of more bad news.

Not to rub salt in the wounds, but backup everything including your flash drives on a regular basis.

BTW, one of my backup drives just died. Can't even see it. In the next day or so I am going to connect it to my PC and run Spin Rite. We shall see.
 
I just had a 250GB HD become unreadable a couple days ago.

I tried Disk Utilities, Disc Warrior and Tech Tool Pro and none worked.

So I put the HD in my PC and ran Spin Rite.

Drive is working fine now and all files are there. Spin Rite is awesome!

Thank you GRC! :)
 
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