Peecee power!

I was happily computing 2 nights ago, when my “table” collapsed. You see, I have this small adjustable table which is right in the middle of my main PC (windows) and bed. That’s where I usually place my laptop and incidentally, my 200GB external drive (which contains my music, work, ebooks, and incomplete anime).

For some reason, the support suddenly gave way, which sent the top part crashing down, along with the stuff on it. Luckily, my Powerbook was on the bed at the time, but my hard drive wasn’t as lucky.

The drive appeared to be perfectly fine when I put the table back, and re-fastened the legs. Then it suddenly unmounted in my Powerbook. Powercycling (turning off and on again) it still didn’t work. It wouldn’t mount, but the OS detected the disc. I tried repairing it in DiskUtility and TechTool but they both stopped/hung in the process. Obviously this suggested physical damage inside the drive (the plates or head). Suffice to say, Apples/Macs can’t do anything about it – given the nature of their software and unix-like mounting scheme.

PC to the rescue

I plugged the drive in the PC and it started auto-scanning the drive’s contents. And also stalled when it hit the iTunes folder (where all the music was). Took about a good 5 minutes before it reacted to my pressing the cancel button. Nonetheless, the good thing was it was able to access the drive!

This is worth mentioning because the Drive was an HFS+ formatted volume (an Apple filesystem), and I needed 3rd party software for the PC just to see the drive… but here I was accessing it via PC, where the mac wouldn’t… or rather couldn’t. For those people who blindly insist that Macs can do everything and more than what PCs can do, I’d absolutely love to see them be in the same pickle I was in – as I laugh at them for being Mac-only users. Simply put, given the nature of the damage, if it weren’t for the PC, then the drive and all its contents would be lost for all eternity (well, unless I bring it to those expensive data-recovery outfits)

Back to the issue: the PC was able to access the drive for as long as the data it acccessed wasn’t in the damaged sector. – I was able to copy back to my PC all my work-related files and Anime completely. I was partially able to retreive about 50% of my eBooks (which wasn’t a biggie, since most were computer magazines anyway). The iTunes folder however only displayed artists folders that roughly spanned from A – B. Which was like 2% of my entire collection. And not all displayed folders meant that they could be accessed: if I tried copying, or even accessing a folder that happened to be in a damaged sector, then it would slow the system and freeze most of the open windows – only curable by rebooting. It was hell playing everything by ear.

After recovering a considerable amount of eBooks, I decided to just forget about the music library and restore the music from my iPod.

PodWorks

Yes, it is possible to transfer tracks from your iPod to iTunes… programs have been made to deal with that, and I found PodWorks to be the most efficient.

The problem was that not all my tunes are loaded in the iPod, I mentioned in previous posts how I “rate” songs, and leave checked the best of each album… on the next sync, it would only upload the checked songs. So I’ll have a complete library in the hard disk, but only selected songs in the iPod.

Fortunately, when I haven’t listened to an album yet, the whole thing stays in the iPod (until I get to rate the songs). Hence most of the new stuff I got was still complete. But I still lost about 20GB worth of songs – which roughly equates to a couple of hundred incomplete albums, which really irritates me.

Anyways, no use crying over spilt milk – I have to re-encode/re-download whatever is missing. I’ve already made playlists of all my incomplete albums so it should be easier to sort them out given time. After organizing everything, I set PodWorks to work: copy everything back to my PowerBook from the time being, while I mosey along to the shop and have my HD replaced.

Hard Disks and Enclosures

I went to the shop and told them about my problem, but I was still in line in the testing facility to determine my eligibility for replacement. To kill time, I went around and looked for more enclosures similar to the one I was lucky enough to get the first time. There was one shop which had 2 in stock (the last, as usual) after haggling a bit, I took both so that I wouldn’t have to worry about finding another similar model in the future.

When technicians are just plain stupid

I described the symptoms precisely to the technicians before I took a walk. Upon returning, I hear them tell me that my drive had no problems. I asked them what they did, they said they formatted it. Oh? I found it hard to believe that a format would miss the physical damage, so I asked them what type of format did they do. A “quick format” they said. It was a damn good thing I asked as I was about to bring home a still damaged HD.

In laymen’s terms, quick formatting simply clears the “table of contents” of a drive. So it only touches the part which has that information (which only references the actual contents) and clears it… which allows you to “overwrite” the data that is already (and still) there, because as far as the computer’s concerned – there’s nothing there.

Anyways, I asked them to do a full format to be sure (and to see their faces when they actually hit the problem). As the format started, the drive hung at an early stage – as it was searching for bad sectors. Obviously so, because this method had to access the drive in its entirety.

To cut a long story short, they acknowledged that the drive was indeed faulty and was to be replaced immediately (it was less than a month old). Unfortunately, they had no stock of the 200GB model. So I’ll have to go back after 3 days (when the stocks were said to arrive). Though I could’ve been impatient and decide to complain or sulk over the matter, I just took it in stride.

I just thought that if I would just be patient, good karma may come my way and make sure that the new hard drive will never meet the same fate as the old one did. Besides, I was able to get the cool enclosures, you can’t have it all 🙂

So my day was a mix of productive and unproductive stuff, but strangely enough, I don’t feel frustrated at all from my “losses.” I guess it was probably because I had 60% of my Music library, and 100% of my work restored. If I was a mac-only user, I imagine my general outlook of the day to be quite the opposite.

Thank you Halimaw (my PC’s name hehehe)

PS.

I know you may be thinking that I shouldn’t even be expecting a warranty since it was damaged by a fall. While your argument may be valid, you should take note that the type of fall shouldn’t have damaged it. Hard Drives are tested well within certain Gs of impact – and the table wasn’t that high. Simply put, it should’ve survived the fall, else they could be liable for false advertising.

But that’s all in the past now, point is I’m glad they did honor the warranty regardless of who was right. So I will patiently wait for the said replacement.