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sureiWell, I just lost the past week to computer problems. What were they, you ask? Well, my main external drive went rather spectuacularly, and mysteriously kaput, in such a way that it corrupted all my other drives as well and it therefore took me about a day and a half to even figure out the problem.
This was after I had decided that my computer was crashing with enough frequency to warrant looking into things again. This particular laptop had never given me must-force-restart problems before, but the one before it... Well, I was having flashbacks, for a while.
Anyway, I figured out it was Ula acting up when, in running Disk Utility (I have a Mac, if you haven't been able to tell yet) to verify/repair permissions and disks and all that, it (1) colorwheels me into oblivion (cue force-restart, then shut down, unplug the cable, start up, and plug back in to make the drives show up again); and then (2) tells me things like 'header damaged' and 'bad blocks'. Yeah. This isn't something I can wave a magic wand at: it needs to be wiped.
Problem. Ula is 200 GB. Fuji (my internal) is supposedly 80 GB, which means more like 74 in reality, and what with applications, libraries, fonts, etc.; three accounts (one for me, one for my sister, and one for Izumi); and the fact that I do take this places by itself, so I need to keep the stuff I'll want to access when I'm away from my externals actually available, I have only about 17 GB free, and I'd like to not take up any more it. Varij (my secondary external) is a 120 GB hand-me-down from the days of LaCie. It's also got stuff on it, like my backup system. Now, only about 90 GB of Ula was used, but even with generous rounding 120 - (80 - 20) < 90.
Fortunately, Dad has all sorts of externals just lying around, since he fills them up like crazy and then goes out and buys a new one, so he lends me another 120 GB that he's named Extra Drive, because that's the kind of naming system he does with drives. Me, I prefer pretty name-sound-things with nature-type meanings, but— anyway. Some fussing and swearing at the power cord hidden under my bed, and I get all three externals plugged in at once, due to the wonderful fact that firewire drives apparently all have two ports each, and start copying.
That's another day, there.
Eventually, it's all copied, double-checked, yadda. Since I'm determined there's going to be nothing remaining of anything that threatens me with eternal colorwheels, force-restarts, and the potential of everything hanging during the gray screen part of startup, I go ahead and tell Disk Utility to not only erase Ula, but zero it out. I don't need the 7-pass or 35-pass, there's no sensitive data here; I just don't want any misreads bringing back glitchy stuff. By the time that's done, bedtime.
I go to bed with a migraine and don't sleep particularly well, since I need to keep waking myself up to remind myself to unclench my jaw, or stop grinding my head into the (firm) mattress. Adding more pain into the equation isn't going to help, after all, but it means I have crazy-obsessive dreams with disturbing logic, I don't get as much sleep... and I wake up the next morning with the migraine still in effect. It doesn't go away until mid-afternoon, when I try a combination of odd-sense-of-balance and chill, and it lifts. Reluctantly.
Back to the computer for stage two of cleaning up Ula. Only it's not Ula any more, so while I'm trying to think of a good new name, I go ahead and tell it to partition. Just one, but it's a different way of erasing the disk a second time. Basically, I'm rebuilding the partition. No problems, it goes just fine, I settle on Oreut for a name, and just to make sure, before I start copying things back into place, I decide to verify the disk one more time.
It (3) tells me it can't be unmounted, and when I try doing it from the desktop, it (4) crashes Finder (again), hard. Really hard. Force-restart doesn't work, it just freezes everything the rest of the way. Trying the power button solo (which, following a failed force-restart is a force-shutdown) almost doesn't work, and let me tell you, for a laptop user, that's a damn scary thing. Pulling the cord isn't going to work, after all, and the battery can run 8 hours when it's feeling generous. But it does shut down, after a moment.
Dad's been keeping up with this the whole time, so this is where he decides that it's time to replace Ula completely. Well, alright. Ula was my first external drive, I'll miss her, but I want a drive that works, after all, not one that's suspect, not one that nearly kills my computer while it's supposedly empty. It'll have to wait until the next day, though.
Before then, I have to shift Extra Drive so it's not sliding sideways into a pile of clean laundry that needs to be put away, and it gets abruptly noisy. You know the sound. It's the car-whirring sound when the engine's somewhere between turning over and engaging. The sound of laboring machinery. A drive that's about to quit and die. It's also the noise that my old laptop used to make, before it got into outright, literal screaming.
Ooogh. Nasty flashbacks. Extra Drive has about half of Ula's data on it, too, and I'd rather not lose it. I've already lost data to my first laptop and my second iPod.
(I swear, there's some kind of curse attached to me that eats computer hardware. Drives, cables, headphones and all.)
Fortunately, I have another weapon. Enter Disk Warrior 4. It prowled around fix-fixing, smacked Ula/Oreut-cum-Noname back into working condition, and saved Fuji from the creeping death that is the consequence of multiple force-restarts on top of each other. Varij was mostly fine, and I have now greater respect for LaCie drives' ability to tough out this kind of shit. No way Noname is going to be a reliable drive any more, though, since bad blocks can only be locked away and hidden. The new drive is still on the schedule.
This brings us to today. Today was the triumphant good stuff, although not entirely so. But I still get to say HAHA! at the end of the day. Because:
1. My beautiful new external drive is 1 TB. Yep. Once upon a time - less than four years ago, in fact - Dad and I went out and bought the drive that would become Ula, and paid $300 for 200 GB. Of course, these days, they won't even sell you anything less than 320 GB (and I remember when that was the biggest size possible, and Dad wanted one so badly), but still. I got five times the space for two thirds the price. (You work that out yourself). Dad is insanely envious, which means that he'll probably get himself one by Christmas. I don't mind.
2. Being what it was, the format was DOS, so it didn't show immediately when I plugged it in. But! I cleverly still had the DiskWarrior disk around, and so I popped it back in, and it found the drive for me. Once visible, I could eject the CD and reformat the HD, and it went so fast! And got everything copied back on, yay.
3. It's a little like having everything brand new, actually. I'd revamped Fuji recently, and what with DW coming in and saving the damsel in distress from the nasty nasty restart-dragon, I figure it's time for the computer version of a storybook ending/wedding: a big ol' celebration (commemorative speech by yours truly; it's what you've been reading) and a name change. Temporarily it's Inner until I can come up with a new name scheme for everything. The huge new external (temp. name Giant) is new. And because I want to actually start using Varij and not have it just sit there... well, the volume Varij is gone. That lovely, sturdy LaCie has been partitioned. One half will be my system backup (documents, etc. get backed up to Giant) and is being called Empty, since it is. For now, at least. The other half (temp. name Trial) is going to be my tester-thing for Leopard.
And if it doesn't give me problems, and I like it, and all that jazz for, say, a month? Then Empty can become the emergency backup to Tiger, and I'll install Leopard for real, regardless of what Dad might say about waiting. I've been waiting. I'm going to try it out.
So I need four new names that all fit together. I find patterns, after all, so that covers number of syllables, the letters used, general impression given by the sounds, the meanings, and so on and so forth. And they need to be able to roll off my tongue in quick succession and give personality, too.
Hm. Maybe angel-types? With the -el and -ute endings? Hmmmmmm.
Ack, it's late. Bed. Triumphantly to bed!
This was after I had decided that my computer was crashing with enough frequency to warrant looking into things again. This particular laptop had never given me must-force-restart problems before, but the one before it... Well, I was having flashbacks, for a while.
Anyway, I figured out it was Ula acting up when, in running Disk Utility (I have a Mac, if you haven't been able to tell yet) to verify/repair permissions and disks and all that, it (1) colorwheels me into oblivion (cue force-restart, then shut down, unplug the cable, start up, and plug back in to make the drives show up again); and then (2) tells me things like 'header damaged' and 'bad blocks'. Yeah. This isn't something I can wave a magic wand at: it needs to be wiped.
Problem. Ula is 200 GB. Fuji (my internal) is supposedly 80 GB, which means more like 74 in reality, and what with applications, libraries, fonts, etc.; three accounts (one for me, one for my sister, and one for Izumi); and the fact that I do take this places by itself, so I need to keep the stuff I'll want to access when I'm away from my externals actually available, I have only about 17 GB free, and I'd like to not take up any more it. Varij (my secondary external) is a 120 GB hand-me-down from the days of LaCie. It's also got stuff on it, like my backup system. Now, only about 90 GB of Ula was used, but even with generous rounding 120 - (80 - 20) < 90.
Fortunately, Dad has all sorts of externals just lying around, since he fills them up like crazy and then goes out and buys a new one, so he lends me another 120 GB that he's named Extra Drive, because that's the kind of naming system he does with drives. Me, I prefer pretty name-sound-things with nature-type meanings, but— anyway. Some fussing and swearing at the power cord hidden under my bed, and I get all three externals plugged in at once, due to the wonderful fact that firewire drives apparently all have two ports each, and start copying.
That's another day, there.
Eventually, it's all copied, double-checked, yadda. Since I'm determined there's going to be nothing remaining of anything that threatens me with eternal colorwheels, force-restarts, and the potential of everything hanging during the gray screen part of startup, I go ahead and tell Disk Utility to not only erase Ula, but zero it out. I don't need the 7-pass or 35-pass, there's no sensitive data here; I just don't want any misreads bringing back glitchy stuff. By the time that's done, bedtime.
I go to bed with a migraine and don't sleep particularly well, since I need to keep waking myself up to remind myself to unclench my jaw, or stop grinding my head into the (firm) mattress. Adding more pain into the equation isn't going to help, after all, but it means I have crazy-obsessive dreams with disturbing logic, I don't get as much sleep... and I wake up the next morning with the migraine still in effect. It doesn't go away until mid-afternoon, when I try a combination of odd-sense-of-balance and chill, and it lifts. Reluctantly.
Back to the computer for stage two of cleaning up Ula. Only it's not Ula any more, so while I'm trying to think of a good new name, I go ahead and tell it to partition. Just one, but it's a different way of erasing the disk a second time. Basically, I'm rebuilding the partition. No problems, it goes just fine, I settle on Oreut for a name, and just to make sure, before I start copying things back into place, I decide to verify the disk one more time.
It (3) tells me it can't be unmounted, and when I try doing it from the desktop, it (4) crashes Finder (again), hard. Really hard. Force-restart doesn't work, it just freezes everything the rest of the way. Trying the power button solo (which, following a failed force-restart is a force-shutdown) almost doesn't work, and let me tell you, for a laptop user, that's a damn scary thing. Pulling the cord isn't going to work, after all, and the battery can run 8 hours when it's feeling generous. But it does shut down, after a moment.
Dad's been keeping up with this the whole time, so this is where he decides that it's time to replace Ula completely. Well, alright. Ula was my first external drive, I'll miss her, but I want a drive that works, after all, not one that's suspect, not one that nearly kills my computer while it's supposedly empty. It'll have to wait until the next day, though.
Before then, I have to shift Extra Drive so it's not sliding sideways into a pile of clean laundry that needs to be put away, and it gets abruptly noisy. You know the sound. It's the car-whirring sound when the engine's somewhere between turning over and engaging. The sound of laboring machinery. A drive that's about to quit and die. It's also the noise that my old laptop used to make, before it got into outright, literal screaming.
Ooogh. Nasty flashbacks. Extra Drive has about half of Ula's data on it, too, and I'd rather not lose it. I've already lost data to my first laptop and my second iPod.
(I swear, there's some kind of curse attached to me that eats computer hardware. Drives, cables, headphones and all.)
Fortunately, I have another weapon. Enter Disk Warrior 4. It prowled around fix-fixing, smacked Ula/Oreut-cum-Noname back into working condition, and saved Fuji from the creeping death that is the consequence of multiple force-restarts on top of each other. Varij was mostly fine, and I have now greater respect for LaCie drives' ability to tough out this kind of shit. No way Noname is going to be a reliable drive any more, though, since bad blocks can only be locked away and hidden. The new drive is still on the schedule.
This brings us to today. Today was the triumphant good stuff, although not entirely so. But I still get to say HAHA! at the end of the day. Because:
1. My beautiful new external drive is 1 TB. Yep. Once upon a time - less than four years ago, in fact - Dad and I went out and bought the drive that would become Ula, and paid $300 for 200 GB. Of course, these days, they won't even sell you anything less than 320 GB (and I remember when that was the biggest size possible, and Dad wanted one so badly), but still. I got five times the space for two thirds the price. (You work that out yourself). Dad is insanely envious, which means that he'll probably get himself one by Christmas. I don't mind.
2. Being what it was, the format was DOS, so it didn't show immediately when I plugged it in. But! I cleverly still had the DiskWarrior disk around, and so I popped it back in, and it found the drive for me. Once visible, I could eject the CD and reformat the HD, and it went so fast! And got everything copied back on, yay.
3. It's a little like having everything brand new, actually. I'd revamped Fuji recently, and what with DW coming in and saving the damsel in distress from the nasty nasty restart-dragon, I figure it's time for the computer version of a storybook ending/wedding: a big ol' celebration (commemorative speech by yours truly; it's what you've been reading) and a name change. Temporarily it's Inner until I can come up with a new name scheme for everything. The huge new external (temp. name Giant) is new. And because I want to actually start using Varij and not have it just sit there... well, the volume Varij is gone. That lovely, sturdy LaCie has been partitioned. One half will be my system backup (documents, etc. get backed up to Giant) and is being called Empty, since it is. For now, at least. The other half (temp. name Trial) is going to be my tester-thing for Leopard.
And if it doesn't give me problems, and I like it, and all that jazz for, say, a month? Then Empty can become the emergency backup to Tiger, and I'll install Leopard for real, regardless of what Dad might say about waiting. I've been waiting. I'm going to try it out.
So I need four new names that all fit together. I find patterns, after all, so that covers number of syllables, the letters used, general impression given by the sounds, the meanings, and so on and so forth. And they need to be able to roll off my tongue in quick succession and give personality, too.
Hm. Maybe angel-types? With the -el and -ute endings? Hmmmmmm.
Ack, it's late. Bed. Triumphantly to bed!