Thursday, December 27, 2007

Another Holiday Ruined by Technology

So around lunch time Christmas Day I'm rendering some of the video I've been shooting of Vivian for a proper DVD on Mom's Mac Mini and blammo, I get a hard crash, followed by the dreaded question mark when I try to reboot. So the evening of Vivian's first Christmas and the day after were spent by me in a haze of frustration and profanity trying to recover Mom's data, including all her painstaking genealogy and family photograph restoration.

As usual, only DiskWarrior could save the data, but you know, I still hate Alsoft for not providing a download of a bootable disk image. They know as well as I do that if I'm really in a jam, and I have one Mac with a corrupt disk, downloading an unbootable disk image from them is just going to send me into a rage. I hate them. I wish Apple would buy them and just put DiskWarrior on a bootable ROM chip so when your crappy HFS+ filesystem gets corrupted you can just hold down a key, boot into DiskWarrior and solve your damn problem instead of having to find a 6p-6p Firewire cable (why Mom had one, I don't know, but it saved us), put your laptop into target mode (thanks for target mode, Apple), and boot your Intel Mini off your G4 PowerBook (thanks for universal binaries, Apple) with DiskWarrior installed on it.

Anyhow, yeah, it was pretty much a disaster, although we did recover the essential data, and a good reminder of why many sane people don't want to have to rely on the computers in their classroom working.

1 comment:

Miguel Guhlin (@mGuhlin) said...

Tom, have you considered doing the following? It's a HECK of a lot faster than booting off a CD, cost you $15 or less for the USB Flash/Pen-drive.

http://www.mguhlin.net/archives/2007/07/entry_3397.htm

Take care,

Miguel Guhlin