Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Burning the Midnight Oil

A friend dropped off his iBook G4. It boots but won't get to the login screen. Disk Utility on my Tiger DVD won't repair it; neither can TechTool Deluxe, which reported surface errors and a damaged Volume Directory. Tried booting from the DiskWarrior 3.0 CD – kernel panic. Can't even mount it in Firewire target disk mode. The drive in my iBook G4 died in July 2005, when it was 19 months old. Fortunately, I had a recent backup on an external Firewire drive. My friend has only partial data backups on a network attached Maxtor OneTouch II. This could get ugly real fast. I hope I can backup at least his Home directory.

Update: the drive is toast. Drive Genius could not even see it in Firewire target disk mode. Oh well. Laptop drives are fragile critters. Backup, backup, backup! (My iBook is backed up nightly).

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