Some Days in the Life - May 16, 1999

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Yesterday was a nicely long entry though. But then I had the time. Today's going to be shorter -- it's a beautiful day and I'm heading out to see the parents. We may hit the waves of Sebago Lake. We may go out to Pat's Pizza (the finest pizza ever, even in it's poorer Southern Maine form) and have a slice or three. We may sit on our butts and listen to the radio. But dang it, we'll do it on a beautiful spring day.

So, this won't be a long entry. Just so you know.

Computer issues, part two.

After finally finishing the backup overnight (with a certain degree of nervousness about that second Jaz disk), I settled to the major business -- how to fix a truly unhappy hard drive. There were two possibilities from the damage. Either the directory and catalog structures were hopelessly corrupt, in which case a full low level reformat and data zeroing should give us a clean slate to slide files back onto... or the media of the hard drive itself had failed.

I was hoping the first was true. I was counting on the second. I grabbed a MacOS 8.5 installer disk and reformatted and zeroed the drive. It took a good half-hour. The hard disk seemed to accept the reformat without complaint, and a Disk First Aid test came out clean, so I installed a minimal system folder.

I then learned the drawbacks of backing your hard drive up with Diskfit Direct.

You see, Diskfit Direct wants to reformat the hard drive it's restoring information to. Which is hard if that's the hard drive your active System is running on. So when I tried to restore my backup, it complained and refused to cooperate.

Then I tried booting off the MacOS 8.5 Installer CD. No good there either -- Diskfit Direct wanted a system disk it could write information to while it was running. Now, I couldn't boot off the Jaz drive, because I needed to change disks on the Jaz drive to run the computer. I couldn't boot off the CD because I needed a writable disk for the restoration. I couldn't boot off of Egoiste's hard drive because it wanted to reformat it.

But I had an old Zip drive. So, I hooked it up and installed a minimal system on it -- nothing but a system folder and Iomega drivers. And I restarted the machine off that system.

Zip disks aren't the fastest way on Earth to run your computer, so that you know. But it worked, and the restoration seemed to go just fine. Even Egoiste's icon information went all right. So, I rebooted off of Egoiste, and hoped for the best. While I was at it, I did the magic rite to rebuild my desktop -- better safe than sorry.

On startup, it reran Disk First Aid. Passed like a charm. And then the desktop started to rebuild.

And froze. My heart sank.

Sighing, I rebooted off the Norton CD and started running Disk Doctor. Catalog damage. Which I couldn't understand at all -- there should have been an entirely new catalog put on the disk as part of the restoration, and those few files I knew were damaged I didn't back up in the first place. So I checked formats.

Apple, about a year ago, came out with a new disk format for their machines, called HFS+. HFS stands for Hierarchical File System, and the original was good, but inefficient. No matter what the size of the disk, HFS wanted the same number of sectors for information. So, instead of a nice, small 4k sector size, my four gig drive had 64k sectors under HFS -- like giving every paragraph in a book an inch of column size whether it had two words or a hundred in it. HFS+ resolved that little problem, freeing up a lot of wasted space on a hard drive.

I had switched to HFS+ over a year ago, and my files and their directory structure expected it. But Diskfit Direct, to be safe (since not all Mac operating systems work with HFS+) had formatted the drive as HFS. The directory suddenly didn't work like the files expected, so the directory file got fragmented all over the disk.

The directory file doesn't like to be fragmented. It gets testy.

So, I ran a Disk Optimizer, then Norton again. This time it passed. I rebooted. The desktop rebuilt. The machine worked more smoothly than it had it months. It had finally, totally, worked.

For now.

The road calls, and so does the dog. I'm out of here. I told you it'd be short.