development blog for the wicked stuff we encounter

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Sunday, after working all day long on the powerbook, I suddenly heard the hard disk doing silly noises, then the mp3 playback stopped and the system halted. I've restarted, but it could'n start the OS. I booted the installation DVD in Rescue mode, and in the Disk utility application, the following error message welcomed me: Invalid Volume Header Checking HFS Plus volume… Checking Extends Overflow file… Invalid node structure The volume Thora could not be repaired after 3 attempts.Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit 1 HFS volume checked 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error Repair attempted on 1 volume 1 volume could not be repaired Holy fuck! All my 55+ gigabytes of data is lost?! I called my friend immediately, and he handed a DiskWarrior CD, but I no longer trusted the original HDD, so I bought a new one - a Samsung 5400/8Mb cached 80G - to replace the old 60G 4700/2Mb one. I also bought a Firewire/USB craddle, and an LG DVD-RAM/DVDRW+ writer. I successfully restored the system with DiskWarrior, and after I CCC-d (a copy application using ditto and psync) the whole old drive to the new one. Afterwards, I booted from the firewire disk, and nothing happened. Sweet Jesus, I spent 90+ minutes for nothing? A complete reinstall would only cost 30... Then I realized the following: 1) The FW connection mysteriously lost in the copy process at 90%, and the symlink under /Volumes/ (/Volumes/FW-backup) reverted to a single folder (!) instead of a link to /dev/sdisk3, so I just copied over from one directory to another... 2) The CCC was unable to copy all kernel files from the root folder. mac.sym mach_kernel were missing, so I needed to copy them manually. After the restart, everything worked as expected, so I was ready for the operation :) I opened and disassembled the Powerbook (as I did several times before) and now I'm writing this article onto the new drive. The old one will be used as another HDD in the Intel-laptop (the current host of Windows Vista and Ubuntu) and the laptop's old drive will function as an external HDD via a 2,5" $10 usb-craddle. (I'm still planing to upgrade my iPod, indeed - see the previous article :))