I don’t want to believe that my drive is dead yet. Yesterday there was a power-outage while I was right in the middle of recording a Cymbal Track in Digital Performer. I feel like that could be at the root of all this, but maybe I’m just in denial. Today I was tweaking some effect automation in the project and DP started to hang.
I should have shut everything down and done a permissions repair right then but I didn’t. Instead I kept trying to work and eventually ended up force-quitting a few programs that didn’t want to shut down in the background like Mail and iTunes… Finally, I decided I had better do a Permissions Repair and when I finally got started up from my Tiger Install DVD and launched the Disk Utility, my internal Hard Drive’s name had disappeared and the volume didn’t mount (pic)
My friend Arin turned me on to DiskWarrior a few years ago, the first time I had a Hard Drive Disappear. Some background information:
In the Disk Utility, a Hard Drive shows up as two things that both have a hard drive icon next to them: An actual device (in my case, “149.1 GB ST3160023AS”), and a volume (the greyed-out “disk0s3″). The Device is exactly that, the actual physical Hard Drive machine component. The Volume is the usable area of a Hard Drive that’s been formatted, the ‘software drive,’ if you will.
I learned early on that generally, moving files around and deleting them doesn’t really move them or delete them necessarily. It mostly just makes changes to a portion of the Volume called the Directory. The Directory is like an Index (or Card-Catalog) of all the files on the Volume. Over time changes made to the directory (by moving files around changing files deleting things etc) cause the Directory to become a big mess of, if you will, “amendments.” A convoluted Directory causes poor system performance (kind of like a lot of bureaucracy in your computer). Also, a convoluted Directory is much more susceptible to being rendered useless by a small amount of damage or missing data. And a useless Directory will make a Drive not even know who or what it is! This is what Defragmentation was all about in the old days. Defragging is like re-organizing the Index or perhaps like writing a whole new Card-Catalog for your hard-drive’s little Library. People say that defragging isn’t really necessary anymore, at least not for OSX machines, but whether or not that is true, a little damage to your hard drive’s Directory still definitely causes major trouble. And consider that information in your Directory is being changed every time you do just about anything including, and most relevantly to my denial, every time you shut down your computer the properly. This is how I can justify believing that my problems today are linked to the power-outage yesterday.
Anyways, on with the Documentation.
Here’s DiskWarrior being so rude as to imply that there’s something actually wrong with my drive other than a screwed up Directory. Notice “Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 1″
Finally DiskWarrior said that it couldn’t replace the Directory. (I didn’t get a picture or an exact quote because at the time I didn’t realize I would blog about this in this much detail. Next time.)
What does “Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 1″ mean?
[cricket sounds]
Four or Five months ago, the last time my internal Hard Drive crashed, I noticed that the guys at the apple store preferred “Drive Genius” to DiskWarrior. I even asked them:
“Is Drive Genius better than DiskWarrior?”
“Yeah. It’s better.” The guy called a Genius replied.
So a few hours ago, I decided to see if one of my few million closest friends owns a copy. And to my delight, one of my few million closest friends agreed to help me with my hard drive problem.
Unfortunately, Drive Genius couldn’t fix my directory either. Not yet anyways.
The thing is: I still don’t believe that it’s dead. To me, the errors in the log don’t look like physical damage/malfunction issues. To me it looks like the program is saying:
“Gosh. that’s too hard for me to fix.”
What does: “Invalid catalog btree reverse link in node – 13691 (0.13691).” mean?
[more crickets]
And I can’t just take this into the shop because I know that I can’t expect a technician that works at the Apple Store to care as much as I do about the music I make and other stuff on my drive. The easy way out for him/her is to re-format the drive and try to install osx on it fresh. If it works they can say “All better” and if there’s a problem after installation they can say “Hard drive was bad.” and just throw it away and replace it. Either way, I can say goodbye to everything since my last backup about 2 or 3 days ago (I know, I know. At least I back up at all). Certainly, I can’t expect anyone else to go through all the trouble of trying to both preserve the data, and figure out what’s up with the Drive.
Now I’m trying TechTool Deluxe and it says everything with the drive is fine up to the Volume Structure test (except the surface scan which I skipped because it takes forever and a problem in that department wouldn’t have stopped DiskWarrior or Disk Genius from working, I don’t think).
As I wait for it to finish analyzing the Volume Structure, I will predict the future: It will say that it needs to be fixed, offer to fix it, but then it will say that it’s too severely damaged to be repaired.
(a few minutes later) I was right about the first 2 parts… Volume Structure needs some help according to TechTool, and TechTool is offering to do some work for me. Note: It passed all the other tests which aids me in my denial of the possibility that there’s actually something physically wrong with my drive. I’m gonna go ahead and hit repair and see what happens (jaded fingers crossed).
To be continued, probably once techtool tells me it can’t do anything for me…
UPDATE:
All three predictions were accurate. Techtool said it could not fix my problem. Is there a such thing as Lazy Software?
Now I’m going to go ahead and do that surface scan just to see…
UPDATE (next morning)
I couldn’t wait for the Surface Scan to complete because it looked like it was going to take a week (literally) and at a certain point, time lost becomes more valuable than data lost…
Here’s what happened next: Before I went to sleep last night, I decided to see what would happen if I tried accessing the drive from another computer, so I started My computer up in “Target Mode,” (which makes the computer behave like a Firewire Drive) by holding down the “T” key as it booted and tried running DiskWarrior on my internal drive again, but this time from a Intel MacBook I borrowed for a few minutes.
I don’t thin it got to step 10 “Writing optimized replacement directory…” before…
At any rate, the process went a hundred times faster and more importantly, it actually worked!
Interestingly enough, last hard drive crash I had (only 4-5 months ago) I found that I was able to access the dead drive and transfer files to an external having connected to a second machine with FireWire 400 via Target Mode more effectively than thru the machine containing the drive itself, which made me suspect there might be something really spooky going on with the Logic Board or something. This time, similarly, what I couldn’t do with the official tools (Utility CD’s, Install DVD’s Etc), I could do with the help of Target Mode.
There it is! My Internal Hard Drive’s Name came back!
I’m not out of the woods though yet. The drive still wont boot the computer. It gets to the gray screen with apple logo and spinning thing and stays there and the fan comes on full bore (which is nice white noise to sleep to).
With my computer started back up in Target mode, using this Intel MacBook, I started a “Repair” with the Disk Utility and went to sleep.
When I woke up it had failed to repair anything. All kinds of bnode and other spooky problems like “siblings” etc… stuff I don’t know about.
I’m thinking about doing it again so I can save the report (I was in a hurry to give the Intel back before).
I got few of the most crucial files off the computer. What’s weird is how long it seemed to be taking. I don’t know if the slow speed is because of all these data problems (bnode shit), failing drive mechanics, or screwed up Hardware or Firmware in my computer, but it definitely moved really slow.
What I really want is to repair this drive and not lose anything.. I’m going to give it another day.
I still believe in my heart of hearts that the drive is physically functioning properly, and that this whole mess was caused by a power outage I had the other day in the middle of some intense processing.
I will update this again…
NEXT UPDATE:
Ok so… The machine still couldn’t boot from the drive, which got it’s name, “ZOMBIE” (because of the mess of files caused by my last major crash) back… I decided to try out getting the data off with Data Rescue II, but it was hanging for ever so I force-quit that and BANG! My drive disappeared altogether! Now, the device doesn’t even show up!
I’m almost completely done with my denial about the drive being fine and it really being the computer, because now the drive clicks. I’ve heard this click before. It’s a sad click. I found a great spiel on a forum about what causes a clicking Hard Drive and I decided to re-post/plagiarize it here on my blog.
I have some pictures to add to this post that are on a different computer, but other than that, I’m basically done with this post I think… I will update this one last time with the final conclusion of this, my latest Hard Drive Drama.
Til then…
UPDATE: The things I have left to try:
I already tried the freezer. I put the drive in a freezer bag, squeezed out all the air (to reduce condensation) put that in another bag (just to be extra careful) and put it in the freezer for a few hours… The idea is that if there’s a short in the voice-coil that moves the readers over the spinning platters, sometimes being really cold will cause enough shrinkage in the copper to un-short the coil. Sounds reasonable to me so I tried it. No luck. When I try the other 2 last resorts, I will update… Things aren’t looking too good though.
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God damn. This sucks.
Here is what I’ve learned in my 10 years of messing with computers and digital media.
You have to be very careful about what you put on your hard drive. Only put something on a hard drive you plan to leave on that hard drive and utilize.
How is this possible you wonder. Well, you have to have a “Media Drive” and use it for all your important media. Music, video etc… Then you have to have a bullshit hard drive and use it for all your dynamic content. Unfortunetly computers aren’t designed this way, so what you have to do is probably use your computers internal drive as your bullshit drive letting it store all kinds of web images, .swf files from youtube, and all kinds of other crap that is stored in all kinds of random spots on your drive.
Then with your media drive, you need to make a clone of it and spend twice the money. Yes, two drives, both with the same capacity and both with the same name. I still don’t have an automated way to keep these two drives in sync but I think the new OS time travel application will do it. Haven’t tried yet.
Then I think you need yet another back up drive. One to back up your entire main OS X drive. So that all of your files stay in tact.
So you with me, this is 4 drives. Your internal bullshit drive, your back up bullshit drive, your media drive of important work and the clone back up to that drive.
Then you have maintaining . The only true maintaining of a drive I know of is to zero all data. This is possible with the disk utility when you got to “erase” a drive and check off “zero all data” in the options.
Doing this will dramatically improve performance of your operating system bullshit drive and of your media drive.
And because you have a clone of each of these drives, doing it is not a problem.
Now, how often do you do this. Well in theory you only have to do it on the media drive when you’ve deleted a good chunk of whats on the media drive and want to put new material on there. However, keeping the future in mind, it’s kind of dumb to delete stuff. So, I suggest simply getting a new media drive in that event and if your pocket book allows, put the old media drive and it’s clone in safe keeping (ideally in two geographic locations) and then get started with a new cloned pair of drives.
On the other hand your internal bullshit drive. There is nothing you can do to prevent the constant downloading and erasing of files and since this is what causes information to be split up all over the Hard drive plater in confusing places for your machine to understand, you’ll want to do this often. Ideally every month, or maybe ever 6 months or at least once a year.
So I’ve had my mac book almost one year and I now need to do that. The thing is so slow and thats why. This is especially important these days because of virtual memory. There is now way you’ll ever afford enough ram for even running something as simple as firefox and having a few web 2.0 pages open and still having your work environment open in the background. So your computer uses your hard drive instead of ram. This sucks big time because as I’ve been discussing, all of our hard drives are totally messed up do to constant loading and then deleting of files.
So I’m excited about the new computers apple has coming out using solid state hard drives. I need to research more but I’m pretty sure that loosing the physical aspect of storing drives and disc platters will eliminate all of what I’m complaining about. What makes me theorize this is the fact that you never have to replace your RAM. Because the area of the RAM that information is stored on doesn’t affect it’s performance. Consider this verses the fact that having a file partially on the inside of a hard drive disc and partially on the outer rim of the hard drive disc can slow down access tremendously. Well, this is what we are dealing with every time a computer locks for a moment.
If I have any of this wrong, I’d be glad to be enlightened, but this is what I’ve found to ring true in my experiences and what I’ve read about in piece meal here and there.