Jon Rutherford - MacGroup-Detroit

MacNews - June 2008
7
Upgrade Gone Wrong
By Phyllis Evans
pmevans@mac.com
The best laid plans… and yadda,
yadda, yadda. Yep. Yours truly,
who constantly harps on
redundant backups… bitten by
the nasty corruption bug. When OS
X 10.5.3 was released I broke all of
my own rules. I didn’t do a mirror
backup first. I didn’t dismount and
shut off my external drives. I didn’t
pay attention.
Decided to download the
combination updater instead of
going through Software Updates.
Now, I usually only do this if the
standard update has broken
something. Why this time? Who
knows. Dumb. Distracted. Overly
confident. Anyway, ran it without
backing up, without shutting
down external drives. Dumb.
When I restarted, it seemed
to go normally, but everything
was running like molasses. Then I
noticed that Spotlight was trying
to reindex everything, including
my partitioned drive that had
my iTunes library and my Time
Machine backup. Couldn’t get it
to stop. It was taking a minute
or more for anything to respond.
Then nothing was responding.
Couldn’t kill any processes.
Instead of just walking away
and letting it chug through whatever
process was hanging things, I
did a forced shut-down. Bad thing
to do, apparently. Restarted in safe
mode, but the damage was done.
The drive with my daily user and
documents backup was okay, but
my iTunes/Time Machine drive was
hosed. It would mount, sometimes,
but copying any data to another
drive was hit or miss. If it encountered
a bad block of data, the drive
would disappear and I’d get the
nasty message that the connection
with the drive was lost. It’s a
Western Digital with both USB and
Firewire, so I also tried connecting
with the USB port. Some with this
drive reported success doing this,
but I wasn’t one of them.
I tried all of my utilities, but
none were able to remedy the
situation, even when the drive
managed to mount. I tried Disk
Utility first, but it failed. Then I tried
TechTool Pro and Drive Genius,
but neither could repair. I finally
ordered the upgrade for Disk Warrior,
my old stand-by, never-fail
app. The Leopard version didn’t
start shipping until late January, so
they could make it Time Machine
compatible. It claimed to have
fixed the iTunes partition, but
couldn’t rebuild Time Machine. It
didn’t fix the iTunes partition.
I’ve been able to rebuild most
of my iTunes library by copying
songs, playlists, videos from my
iPods with a very nice piece of
software called iPod Access from
http://www.findleydesigns.com/
ipodaccess/index.html . $19.99
and worth it to me. Most of the
rest were backed up on CDs and
DVDs, but it was actually a good
way to clean out the deadwood.
After managing to rescue a
few more movies, I finally bit the
bullet and reformatted the drive
during one of the rare moments
that it would appear on the
desktop. I’m sure now that it’s a
hardware issue that was coming
on. After reformatting and removing
the partitioning, it seemed that
all was well. I set Time Machine up
again, started it, but after copying
a third of my internal drive it came
up with a hardware error. Ran
Disk Utility repair, but it reported
nothing wrong. My next step is to
contact Western Digital. It’s still
under warranty.
The moral of the story — while
one backup is great, two are better.
Before doing any major upgrades
or installing anything that affects
the system, make sure you have
a current, bootable backup. Two
are better. Dismount and shut off
all external drives. Keep a current
utility disk handy just in case. Even
though it didn’t work this time,
Disk Warrior is still my preferred
utility. I will be sure that I always
have the most current copy on
hand.
Oh, and I also disabled Spotlight.
I never use it, and it’s been
a thorn in my side. It involves
removing two files from the
System folder Library. Information
may be found here: http://
www.macosxhints.com/article.
php?story=20071102215912892 I
don’t miss it, and there are other,
better search utilities available.
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