State of the Computer

Well, the computer lives — though we’re definitely dealing with a near-total case of amnesia.

On the bright side, a new hard drive has been purchased and installed (and I love how easy it is to install a hard drive into a PowerMac G5 [.pdf link]), the OS is installed, and I’m going through the (slow, laborious) process of downloading and reinstalling all the various programs I use on a day-to-day-basis. Also, as I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail address for some time now, most of my recent e-mail still exists (on Google’s servers), which is allowing me to rebuild my address book and contact lists.

So, there’s progress.

The downside, of course, is that so far I’ve been unable to coax the dead drive into doing much of anything. I haven’t given up completely, though. Using some instructions from Apple I used fsck on the problem drive and got the following:

Quicksilver:/ djwudi$ sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk1s9
Password:
** /dev/rdisk1s9 (NO WRITE)
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
   Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** The volume   needs to be repaired.

A quick Google for ‘mac os x invalid b-tree node size‘ led me to this Macworld Forums discussion which indicates that either DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro should be able to at least recover my data, if not actually repair and resurrect the drive. So I think that acquiring one of those will be my next step, though that will have to wait for a week or three until I’ve got a paycheck not already claimed for little things like rent, bills, and food. With luck, though, those will allow me to pull the old data off once I get to that point.

And if that doesn’t work, then I can always try the freezing trick that’s been mentioned by Nitallica and Josh. Seems a little bizarre, but hey, if it might help….

In the meantime, rebuilding goes slowly, but I’m making progress. I also picked up an external enclosure for an old 80Gb drive I had been meaning to liberate from my old Blue and White G3, slapped the pieces together, and now have an external drive that I’ll be using as a backup repository using SuperDuper!, which I found though a rundown of OS X backup software pointed out to me by Marcus. Once that’s up and running, than even if this happens again somewhere down the line, I won’t have lost the data.

I know: backup, backup, backup! You always think it won’t happen to you…and then it does. Ah, well. So it goes.

Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions!