Technology Cometh and Technology Goeth
I looked at the drive space left on my hard drives. My PowerBook, with a 100GB drive was partitioned into three sections, one for the OS holding out with less than 6 GBs free, one for my documents that claimed less than 10 free GBs and one partition of music, which also had about 5 GB remaining. My 250 GB drive was partitioned into three sections as well. A section for backups, which had a good 20+ GBs free, a small section which housed the last known state of my Tiger Installation, with only a few free GBs and an open space, with less than 10 GBs remaining where I put the data files for Apple’s Pro apps. My 320 GB drive listed about 15 GB of free space, full to the brim with photos and videos.
I looked back up at the computer screen. A two bay NAS enclosure for $129, and two 750 GB hard drives for $99 a piece. I hesitated, I waited, I looked around a little bit more, and I bit.
Flashback
A few years prior to this I had bought a PC from my friend. Up to this point I had only ever used Macs, but I wanted a PC for a few reasons. A) To get to know Windows better. B) To look at websites in IE for various web development projects. C) To play a few games I had acquired. D) Last, but not least, to run SpinRite, should I ever get around to buying a copy.
Recently I had been using the PC to download music from OC Remix, take pictures of campus building project over a web cam, and chat with contacts via Digsby. I was also listening to more music from it, simply because it cleared up more processing power from my laptop.
Present Day
A week later I had all the pieces and I quickly assembled the NAS, setting it up and configuring it to my needs. This is when I hit my first snag. Leopard doesn’t play well with Samba. I could connect to my NAS, I could see the files, but I didn’t have permission to copy and data or move anything around.
Now comes the question of blame. Is Apple to blame for this blunder or am I? I, purchased the NAS as an impulse buy, but I was looking at getting one anyway sooner or later. Clearly, Apple changed it’s implementation of Samba in Leopard and it seems that many people are having problems. I now had a NAS set up, but I couldn’t use it.
The NAS had specifically stated, on a brightly colored half sheet of paper, that Leopard users might find it easier to use FTP. FTP my USB drive, for my intents and purposes an FTP connection was not going to cut it. So I installed MacFUSE and tried to get that up and running. I tried ExpanDrive to see if that would help. Neither worked; I still had the same type of permission errors.
I knew from my work at school that the studio used a program called DAVE to connect to SMB servers from the Macs in the lab. So I headed over to Thursby to get a trial copy. (Turns out it was a bit more expensive than I thought for a single user license. $119.) I downloaded the trial and got it installed.
DAVE worked beautifully, at least, for a short while, until my laptop Kernel Panic-ed. What’s more, after Kernel Panic-ing several times I started to get a very odd black screen with interesting text upon rebooting. The computer could not get past this point.
Not fearing much, I booted from my Tiger Drive. The boot-up worked well, but the computer was very, very slow and it kept hanging for periods of time. The symptoms reminded me of an iBook I had worked on about a year or so ago. The end result of that job was replacing the iBook hard drive and re-installing the OS. I was beginning to see a similarity between the two cases, perhaps my laptop drive was failing.
The Mistake and the SpinRite
I own a copy of SpinRite. I actually had purchased it only a month or so before I started having problems. I often listen to Security Now and hear people using SpinRite as a last resort, each time telling myself that I would never be that silly. SpinRite always would come first.
I knew what SpinRite did and I figured if anything could save my drive, it could. However, I wasn’t quite ready to take my PowerBook apart and take out the hard drive. Besides, even if I was, I didn’t have the IDE adapter I needed to go from a 2.5 to a 3.5 inch drive.
So I pulled out my Leopard install disk and fired it up. I opened Disk Utility and decided to erase my OS partition, zeroing that part of the drive. I figured this might work that part of the drive enough to figure out what wasn’t working. With one minute left in the process, it hung. I did a hard reboot after waiting for quite some time, and tried it again. This time it finished. I then began the installation process to get my OS up and running. I was quickly met with an error screen stating the process could not be completed. At this point, I knew it was time for SpinRite.
I picked up the phone and called around to about a half dozen local computer shops. No one had the adapter I needed. My spirits sank like the The Edmund Fitzgerald, but I was not deterred. I jumped on my PC, headed to Google to find the part I needed. I ended up going the cheapest route I could from an eBay seller, unfortunately having to wait for the package to ship from China.
About a week and a half or so later I had the part I needed. I found the instructions to take apart my PowerBook and began the process. I got my hard drive out and put it in my PC to let SpinRite do it’s job. I set it up to run on level 4, watched it jump into Dynastat Mode for a bit, then left to go to class. I came back a few hours later to find that it was still chugging away, claiming it would take about 22 hours to finish. I figured that sounded right, so I played some video games with my friend and went to bed.
The next morning it was still hard at work, with no change in progress. This worried me a bit, but I let it work and used the time away from the computer to get more homework done. The next few days went by much the same.
At this point I realized I could not continue on without a computer, so I talked to my friend and between the two of us we got another case set up that I could use solely as a SpinRite tower.
I must say, it is over this five day period that I underwent a change, one that I will talk about in more detail later, but for now I will just say this. I was living off my iPod Touch, using the school’s computer lab when I needed too. While I felt empty without my constant internet access, I felt like I had more time to work than I ever had in a long time.
Exactly five days after I had started SpinRite, it had only progressed 0.24%. I decided that was enough and I told it to pause. Two hours later, SpinRite was finally ready to pause what it was doing and let me reboot the computer. I shut down, removed the drive and carefully placed it in the other case. I booted up the second computer to hear my hard drive go “bzzz-tick” several times and get an “INIT DISK” error. I tried again, same thing.
My first step was now to make sure that the case was working properly. So I grabbed the old hard drive from the iBook I had fixed and put that in the case. It booted up right into SpinRite without a problem. So I shut it down and tried my drive again. Didn’t work. I then put my drive back in my main PC and tried to boot it up. This time I got a “No Hard Drive Connected” error that I could not pass.
Once more I tried it in the SpinRite case. Same exact thing, only less hard drive noise. That was it. My hard drive was dead.
With nothing else to do, I put the 40 GB iBook hard drive in the SpinRite case and let it go to town. I then went to the internet to buy a new laptop hard drive. I decided I needed to upgrade, but I didn’t want to spend more than I had too. I settled on a 160 GB Hitachi drive, partly because I liked the price but mostly because I like the brand.
A few days later I had the hard drive. I put it carefully into my PowerBook, and after a minor mishap of connecting it incorrectly at first. (I’m embarrassed to say it, but I’m honest.) I had my Mac back up and running.
[Side note, after a few days SpinRite had fixed the iBook’s drive. Which I had speculated upon when I had to fix the iBook, but I didn’t have a copy of SpinRite at that time.]
Returning to Normality
It will be several weeks before I am completely back to normal on my laptop. Fortunately, I had backed up my documents with SuperDuper only a day or two before the incident, so I didn’t lose anything important. It has been awhile since I had a clean install, and I think it’s time to trim my application barrage back, especially when it comes to background applications.
How does this fit into my treatise?
These past events have effected me greatly. In some sense, I feel like this disaster was the culmination of my curricular studies this semester. Living for five days without a computer gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate my time and to see how much technology I really rely on to do my day to day tasks. I was freed from the constant stream of information that bombards my day to day activities and let me focus on things that really mattered.
Now, using this sequence of events, I will be able to pull in various aspects of my studies in Communication and Media Ecology to better understand the big picture.