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by John
Norton, 11-14-99
Stupid, stupid, stupid -- I didn't back-up my Blueberry iBook's hard drive. That can REALLY hurt.
My family has had Macs for 15 years -- ever since the beginning in 1984, when my dad bought a 128K Mac. In all that time, we've never had a hard drive crash on us. Yeah, we've lost data through various mishaps, such as accidentally deleting files, and a few files have gotten corrupted, but an actual hard drive crash never happened. You know, the kind where you lose EVERY SINGLE BIT OF DATA on your hard disk.
Three days ago, that changed. Thursday afternoon, at about 4:45 EST, my Blueberry iBook's hard disk died. I had just quit Myth II, after dealing my brother David a whopping defeat in a netgame of WWII Recon (a cool plug-in for Myth II), when the computer froze. It hadn't quite finished loading the Finder, and it was just sitting there with a spinning watch. After a minute or so, I did the normal restart (which I haven't had to do too many time on my iBook). I glanced away for a couple seconds, and when I turned back I had a flashing Mac OS folder / question mark.
"Uh... David... look at this..." and then, "where's my Mac OS 9 CD!" I didn't panic, really. I figured the system file must have been corrupted or something. Oh boy was I wrong. I really started to worry when Mac OS 9 had booted off the CD, and a dialog box came up with something to the effect of "This disk cannot be read. Would you like to initialize it?" Yeah, right!
Obviously, I didn't initialize it -- I had to give Disk First Aid a chance! I quickly navigate to Disk First Aid on the CD and start it up. Disk First Aid found two disks -- "Mac OS 9" and something like "@!E)R#$%*#$." Second indication that things weren't good.
I immediately selected "@" and clicked "Repair." It took about 5 - 10 seconds for Disk First Aid to search Mac OS Standard (HFS) structures and Mac OS Extended (HFS+) structures and report major problems that Disk First Aid could not fix. I don't remember the exact error, but it was something like "Invalid Node Size, 3,0."
By this time I was thinking about all the data I had on my iBook that I hadn't backed up -- virtually everything. Fortunately, most to all of my email is also received on our Performa 6400, so that wasn't too much of a problem. But I was thinking about my half-finished review of the iBook, my new design ideas for MacMilitia.com, and many many other things (including all my saved games!). Dang, that hurts.
After trying to fix it with Disk First Aid a few more times (hey, it doesn't hurt to try!), I called the local computer store (who I happen to design web pages for), and asked if they have Norton Utilities 5.0 for Mac. I got lucky this time -- they did!
Friday morning I went in and started work. Unfortunately, Norton Utilities 5 couldn't be found -- the Mac CD case was lost. They had 4.0 though, so I tried that -- couldn't start up my iBook. So, I plugged my iBook into their Ethernet network, and stuck the CD in the closest iMac. Sure enough, I was able to use it via File Sharing. It wasn't compatible with OS 9, so restarted with my original Mac OS 8.6 iBook CD. Norton Utilities ran, but kept quitting -- no luck.
That's when I was told that Symantec has a free 30 day trial of Norton Disk Doctor 5.0 online. Using the iMac with an ISDN connection, I quickly downloaded and installed it. I ran it on my iBook through File Sharing. Disk Doctor found several problems, and fixed them all. It was checking merrily away, until a dialog box popped up and said "Unexpected end of file. You may try examining again." Oh no. So I tried again... and again... and again. Same problem.
That's when I noticed something VERY odd. Disk Doctor said that "@" is a Mac OS Standard disk. I was about 99% positive that my iBook hard drive was originally Mac OS Extended, and I know I hadn't changed it. I gave up with Disk Doctor, and decided to initialize my hard disk and start fresh.
Later that day, I became 100% sure that my iBook's hard drive was Mac OS Extended -- I called my friend and asked him if he knew which it was (before I told him that Disk Doctor thought it was Mac OS Standard), and he said "Mac OS Extended... remember when we were looking at the get info box the other day?"
Here's my theory as to why Disk First Aid and Norton Disk Doctor couldn't save my hard disk. Somehow, the tiny little block of data that specifies what format the disk is got changed from HFS+ to HFS when Myth II crashed. I have no clue as to how that would have happened, but I think that's what did happen. My iBook started up and saw I had an HFS disk, but couldn't find any HFS structures. Of course, it didn't know to look for HFS+ structures on an HFS disk! Same thing happened to Disk First Aid and Disk Doctor -- why look for HFS+ structures on an HFS disk? That's my guess anyway.
The moral of the story is this: BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE!!! You should at least back up the important stuff -- you know, the documents and other files that you can't easily reinstall off a CD, the internet, or another computer. If you have a Zip drive, use that. Or you could use Jaz, Orb, SuperDisk, or even another Mac via file sharing.
I've decided to turn over a new leaf: I'm going to back up my important documents to another computer nearly every day -- over my Ethernet network of course. :-)
If you have any comments whatsoever on this article, fire off an email to john@macmilitia.com, and post in our Discussion Forums! I'd really like to know what you think of my HFS+ to HFS theory... is it totally wacko, or very possible?
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of MacMilitia.com!
-John Norton, Webmaster @ MacMilitia.com
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