Powerbook status (and other stuff)

This is my second post from my blog’s web-interface since God knows when. I’m already missing Ecto. Unfortunately, I’m too tamad to install the Windows version.

It’s official (at least as far as I’m concered): the Powerbook’s hard disk has physical damage. The good news is that I was able to recover most of, if not all my important files. So now I’m not worried about having this unit serviced – they can do whatever they want with it.

The Concern

I was hesitant in having the unit repaired because of the fact that I couldn’t access the hard drive at all at – and couldn’t salvage any of my important files. ¹ Whenever something bad happens to my system (wether on a PC or Mac) I tend to end up reformatting as a habit – of course only after I back everything up. This fear, and need to back-up was from [Juan][]’s previous mishap from what was supposed to be a simple hard-disk upgrade. While I have no doubts that our Apple service centers have competent technicians, I’m also not surprised as to how they seem to not care about data loss.

It seems to me that ultimately, they just focus on getting the hardware aspect of the service done by any means necessary – even if it meant losing data. Of course they’ll try to back your stuff up, but should something happen that is out of their standard contingecy protocols, I doubt that they’ll feel obligated to spend some extra service time to redo everything just to make sure you don’t lose your data.

So I delayed the trip to the service center until I exhausted all avenues of getting my data back myself.

Getting My Files Back

I partially retract my statement about the absence of Mac software that can bypass the famous B-Tree (or whatever the hell it’s called), and read data from a direct and exhaustive surface scan. Such software exists and, more importantly, works! Which is more than I can say from the other more popular disk utilities. But first, let me tell the story in the proper order.

Long Live the Older Generations

I’m sooo glad I didn’t sell my 60GB iPod photo. Older Macs (non-Intel) cannot boot from USB, only FireWire; which can be quite a hassle since almost every goddamn preipheral being sold now uses USB. I had 3 drives that support both USB and IEEE 1394 (FireWire), but imagine how pissed I was when I couldn’t boot from any of them! The enclosures indeed are sexy, but their chipset sucks! When I get enough cash, I’m replacing all my enclosures with something better.

Luckily, my girlfriend calls me up, was off early, and had the iPod with her; so I pass for her and went to her house for the cable. To hit two birds with one stone, she also grabbed the first season of Prison Break (which we haven’t seen, and which is awesome by the way) to watch while I tried fixing my ‘puter.

Long story short, I installed OS X on the iPod and booted from it.

Data Rescue

After failed attempts with DiskUtility, DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro, [Data Rescue II,][de] by Prosoft Engineering, saved my ass! It was able to scan, and not hang when it hit the bad blocks. The other apps wouldn’t continue when they hit those blocks. Data Rescue on the other hand, when hitting bad blocks, switches to a “slow search” on the blocks around it so it can continue the salvage.

At the end of it all, it was able to detect the data in the hard disk. Yay!

What Now