If you can read this...
...it's some kind of miracle.
About a month or so ago, I noticed that the internal hard drive on my G4 (that'd be the main boot drive) was making some alarming "thunk-sqeak" noises in rapid succession, locking up my Mac in the process. Usually this noise would repeat for about 30 seconds. I took this as a sign that the drive was failing, got a 300 GB external Firewire for backup and started a nightly backup schedule.
Last Friday, I had to restart my G4 and it appeared that the drive had finally given up - it wouldn't start up to that drive and would make those awful noises when trying to mount the drive. No problem - I had a backup, and I used it. :-) Now here's where irony steps in.
I was happily using the backup until yesterday afternoon, when I decided to update to 10.4.2. I should preface this by saying that, using the backup, I was unable to install system software updates for iTunes 4.9 and the iPod updater over the weekend after having switched to the backup full-time. I chalked that up to backup weirdness. But when I went to install the 10.4.2 update, I got an alarming message that the update couldn't install and that it had been deleted. I decided to restart with the hopes of clearing out any voodoo. Unfortunately, that was instead a sign to the voodoo spirits to invade en masse.
Long and brutal story short: simply plugging my "backup" Firewire drive into any Mac causes it to kernel panic instantly (ditto if I try to use the USB2 interface on the drive), so I can't access any data on it. My failed "thunk-sqeak" drive has been repaired with DiskWarrior and is now limping along, sans backup. The internal CD drive on this G4 is also shot - it won't see most CDs, including the DiskWarrior repair CD and the various system software install CDs. It's probably been that way for a while as I hardly use this Mac for anything more than e-mail, chat and testing nowadays. I was able to hook up an external firewire CD/DVD drive and use that to get this far.
One interesting side effect of all this is that this blog is hosted on the near-death G4. When it goes down, my G4 is likely down with it. I hope to rectify all this within the next 2 weeks, but I don't have time to mess with it now. I've desperately got to finish up some networking stuff in Tiger Woods 2005 so we can actually ship it (hence the need to get this stupid G4 limping along), fly to Austin for a few days then immediately fly to Vegas for a mini-vacation.
Comments
It's always a bad idea to have the boot volume be a firewire drive, they don't even recommend you have firewire volumes plugged in during OS updates. Dunno why, it seems like it should be easy enough to support...
Posted by: Humbaba | July 13, 2005 08:19 AM
Who are "they" and do you have a link to where they recommend not doing this?
Posted by: Brad Oliver | July 13, 2005 12:57 PM
Heh. Crimeny. You know, "They". :)
I'm sure I've read it on
www.macintouch.com
but I can't say for sure. I know I've read multiple times about people having issues with OSX and firewire drives, I love them but only use them for data.
Personally, I'd yank the known good disk out of the firewire enclosure, stick it in the G4, and put the sketchy disk in the firewire enclosure.
Posted by: Humbaba | July 13, 2005 02:09 PM
I'd like to do the disk swap, but it appears that the drive itself is the problem, not the firewire enclosure. I tried mounting it using the USB2 interface, and it still kernel panicked the Macs.
I was able to reboot into OS 9 and on a wild hunch was able to get Disk First Aid to cough up an error about an invalid key length or some such. (This is part of the long story that I cut short.) Some googling revealed that this is apparently "fatal" and requires a disk reformat to fix. I tried DiskWarrior under OS 9 as well and it wouldn't even find the drive to recover the directory. Since I can't mount the drive in OSX, I'll have to reboot into OS 9 at some point and reformat it there, I think.
However, now that my originally-failing internal drive is usable, I can get Norton for OS 9 off it and possibly try to repair the external backup drive that way. It's just a matter of determining how much time I should sink into recovering essentially 4 days of lost e-mail vs. just reformatting.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | July 13, 2005 03:17 PM