I haven’t been updating my blog recently for various reasons.
Firstly, with my new job I haven’t had as much free time as I had before, there’s been a lot of cricket on (England v India, South Africa v Australia and Sri Lanka v Pakistan all at the same time), and then on Thursday evening a bit of a disaster happened.

I was making a copy of the Greatest Game (see last blog post) for a couple of mates, as Sky Sports had repeated the highlights and i’d recorded it on DVD-R, so with my DVD burner i was able to quickly make copies. I was just testing the disc had copied ok in Frontrow (which had a kind of hacked installation to make it work on my mac) when it got jammed on fast forward. I couldn’t stop it, force quit frontrow, switch applications or anything, leaving me with one choice: Force restart!

9 times out of 10 this would probably have been fine, but this time something went very wrong – instead of the lovely boot panel “Welcome to OSX”, what I got was this at startup:

I left it till Friday before doing anything as I had a far more important “executive meeting” at the pub and thought it should be a simple case of archive and reinstall OSX. However, on friday, i tried booting up from the install DVD and it wouldn’t even do that. My biggest fear… Hardware fault sprang to mind. Out came the toolkit to take things apart and find out where the fault was. To confuse things further, I was able to boot into OS9 and could see the hard drive there – this suggested something else was at work, and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

While taking things apart i narrowed the problem down to the OSX hard drive which for some reason, when it was on the ATA bus it wouldn’t boot into OSX regardless of the startup media. So, i needed to replace it and Saturday morning is the computer fair in Central London. With a wad of cash I went there to fix things up while not causing too much bank balance damage.

It was a successful day, and for £147 I came back with two new hard drives, and a Firewire 400/USB2.0 enclosure
For the internal, I replaced the faulty Maxtor 120Gb with a Seagate Barracuda 120Gb – I wasn’t particularly bothered about the brand
For the external, I purchased a Maxtor 300Gb with 16Mb Cache – this would serve two purposes: 1. To recover what I could off the faulty drive, and 2. To actually be a backup drive

Here’s what the enclosure looks like sat atop my mac (the white box behind with all the Green LEDs is my ethernet switch, and you can see part of my cannon scanner to the left of the picture):

Apologies for the quality of the photo, I took it with my 1megapixel camera phone and transferred it by bluetooth, as i couldn’t be bothered to get all the cabling out for my proper digital camera!
I think the silver goes quite well (it was also available in black) and at £20 for the enclosure including Firewire and USB cables i thought it was a bargain.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, 2 1/2 days later (copying 100Gb worth of files several times), everything is nearly back to how it was and I recovered all my data. Just need to reinstall a couple of GUI tweaks, Dev tools and reinstall a few add-ons again.

I will decide later on in the week whether to try and fix the old Maxtor hard drive and use it as my second internal hard drive, as currently I have the original 20Gb drive there. The extra 100Gb would be very useful and allow me to free up a fair amount of space on the OSX drive. Plus 120+120=240Gb which is less than the 300Gb external drive, so I would still be able to back it all up.

Just before setting out for the computer fair a package arrived for me in the post from my good friend MacHeadCase
It was a very useful gift, and it is now on my keyring:

It joins all the other junk I have on there like my Pentium Processor that I drilled a hole in
It’s not just a keyring of a lizard, it’s very cleverly shaped tail and foot act as a bottle opener. Given how much I like beer it will almost certainly be of great use for times at a party when there’s bottled beer about!