{"id":57,"date":"2008-04-11T00:01:17","date_gmt":"2008-04-11T07:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2013-02-10T21:52:57","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T04:52:57","slug":"hard-drive-crash-oh-noes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=57","title":{"rendered":"Hard Drive Crash! Oh Noes!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was due. During a routine restart after a software upgrade, I lost a hard drive. Fortunately it was an external, backup hard drive. The most disappointing part, sadly, is that this is possibly the fourth external hard drive I’ve had crash in as many years. Why do external hard drive suck so badly?
\n
\nLike all the external hard drives I’ve lost, this one was only a few months old. It was an Iomega Silver-something, 500GB external USB drive. I bought it with my Mac OS X “Leopard” upgrade. The drive served as the external Time Machine<\/em> (backup) drive. (Remember, Time Machine was the reason I suffered through the Leopard upgrade, and I still think it’s awesome.)<\/p>\n

One morning the Mac needed to restart after a software update. Restarting is a common ordeal for software updates, though it seems less common on the Mac than on Windows Vista.<\/p>\n

When the Mac started again, the external hard drive’s icon failed to show up on the desktop. I did some quick troubleshooting:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I used the Disk Utility<\/em>. It showed the drive, but not the volume<\/em>. That meant that the drive itself was recognized by the computer’s USB system. But the volume, which means the disk (as opposed to the drive), was missing. That’s bad.<\/li>\n
  2. Because the drive was warm (hot, actually) I let it rest. I tried starting it again. Nothing.<\/li>\n
  3. I tried plugging the drive into a PC to see if the problem was the interface. No luck.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Those three steps confirmed the worst. The drive died. RIP.<\/p>\n

    A quick check of the system logs confirmed that the problem wasn’t new. By using the Console<\/em> application in Mac OS X, I was able to review what the operating system experienced with the drive; it had suffered numerous errors before it finally died. So even if the drive didn’t kick the bit bucket, odds are slim that I would have been able to reliably use it to backup.<\/p>\n

    A replacement My Book drive was secured and it backed up all my stuff. Time Machine was once again up and running again on the Mac. I’ve had good luck with the My Book drives on my PCs (also for backup), so perhaps using one on the Mac is a better solution.<\/p>\n

    Lesson to be learned: Always keep and use an external backup drive. Backup often. Backup frequently, especially when your computer is having other, incidental problems. Be safe. Be happy. Compute wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It was due. During a routine restart after a software upgrade, I lost a hard drive. Fortunately it was an external, backup hard drive. The most disappointing part, sadly, is that this is possibly the fourth external hard drive I’ve had crash in as many years. Why do external hard drive suck so badly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4231,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/4231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}