Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Hard drive failed


Yesterday the hard drive in my laptop failed.  I knew that it was coming, as my computer was making a lot of noise and would slow to a halt.  With hindsight being what it is, I know I should have taken care of the problem when the noise started happening.


Since I needed to get a new drive, I decided to get the largest one that I could.  I got a 100 GB drive for $179 at Fry's Electronics.  I spent a lot of time last night attempting to recover the data from the bad drive.  Since the drive was still readable, I was hoping that I would be able to copy all of the data off the drive onto the new one.




I gave up after several hours, since the drive failure was causing access on that drive to slow to a crawl.  I attempted to use diskutil in single user mode. I decided to reinstall OS X from scratch, then I restored from the backup that I made last week. (I had made the backup using Apple's Backup software.  I actually had not continued my .Mac subscription, but Backup was still working.  In order for me to restore, I had to sign up for a free 60 day trial of .Mac.)


I had backed up all of my important documents, but I missed some files that caused me a little headache.


  • .bashrc file

  • .ssh directory - so I lost my ssl private keys (luckily I did not change my servers to accept public key logins only)

  • ~/Library/Application Support/ directory. - I lost my Firefox bookmarks

  • ~/bin - I lost some scripts that I had written


But honestly I am glad that I did the backup that was just a few days old.

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