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Eric

Black Friday

Posted on 2007.11.23 at 15:30
Current Location: 75409
Current Music: The Cars - Greatest Hits
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Bit of a scare yesterday morning. For reasons I can't entirely articulate, I chose to unmount my iTunes volume from the PowerMac G4 and power down the box last night. This morning, the iTunes volume didn't do anything but 'click' on power up. My entire collection of music. ~18,000 songs, 67GB. Most of it is backed up.

On CDROM.

Offsite.

External drive clicking can be attributed to something other than hard drive failure, and that's low power. Though this is a 7200 rpm 8MB/cache full-size drive (read, requires power to run) its still in an external enclosure, so I removed it from its case and put in inside the G4.

That worked!

But getting anything across the G4's low-speed USB 1.0 port is painfully tedious. Still, something has to be done. I loaded up the kids and trekked out on Black Friday to brave the crowds around noon. Oddly enough, there weren't any. And there were no lines at the checkout. And I found a 500GB external USB drive for $87.

Backing up teh max0r in preparation for upgrading to Leopard was a non-issue. The high-speed USB 2.0 port on the mini is just that: High-speed. The idea is once I backup/restore everything, this new .5TB drive can become my Time Machine. drax0r recently implemented an identical strategy. So with everything backed up on the mini, I turn to the G4 and copy the contents from the now internal 160GB drive to a folder on the new drive. 30 hours to transfer. Good grief.

Leopard is fast and beautiful and I love the new dock and everything about it. I'm very excited. Until I install the 10.5.1 upgrade, which craters my box.

So I reinstall, and everything works great. drax0r suggests reinstalling the update, which craters my box.

So I reinstall, and nothing works.

At all.

Further attempts to reinstall are blocked by copies of archiving my data to the point my boot drive fills up. Thank goodness for Terminal and the rm -Rf command.

Re-re-re-re-re-reinstalling again now.


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Comments:

irulan_amy at 2007-11-24 18:47 (UTC) (Link)
A 500GB drive for $87 - mind you, I don't know a ton about computer language, but isn't that an awesome deal?!

Um, here's to re-re-re-re-re-reinstalling!
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-24 18:56 (UTC) (Link)
Yes ma'am, the diamond in the rough to this story if we must. Fortunately I ran CAT-5 to the garage last week when I set up the PowerMac for the party, so here we are.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
Tomas Gallucci
schpydurx at 2007-11-24 23:19 (UTC) (Link)
Fortunately I ran CAT-5 to the garage last week when I set up the PowerMac for the party
Why does this matter?

Edited at 2007-11-24 11:20 pm (UTC)
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galinda822 at 2007-11-24 19:43 (UTC) (Link)
I can't wait to get my Leopard! Of course, I'll have Christopher help me install it.
BTW...I think he's going full-time with Apple in January - as a trainer!
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-24 19:50 (UTC) (Link)
Yours will handle Leopard admirably. Mine is a first-gen overclocked G4 which barely made the cut as far as minimum CPU speed. My next Mac will be the one you & schpydurx have. And congrats to Christopher! That freaking rox0rs.
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time3 at 2007-11-24 20:13 (UTC) (Link)
Good luck with getting your library back on-line. This has always been one of the reasons I keep my library on a RAID array. I currently hold our 65G library of music on Solaris 10 in ZFS (RAID-Z) across 4 33.6G UW 10k SCSI disks on the Enterprise 250. I have it backed up on a single 80G EIDE disk in case.

Leopard, I've read, comes with ZFS, so you are able to do nice arrays now in OS X.
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-24 20:18 (UTC) (Link)
I do have a D1000 I could stripe. I may have to consider that. ZFS is a fantastic idea. I'm still waiting to be able to create a bootable ZFS partition. There were rumors of that coming to the 08/07 release of Solaris, but as you know, that never materialized. I'm not what anyone considers an early adopter and will likely fully embrace ZFS once its got a little more maturity under its belt. That's the nice thing about running it at work though - I'll know when that time has come.

Thanks for the suggestion!
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
drax0r
drax0r at 2007-11-24 21:22 (UTC) (Link)
Leopard, I've read, comes with ZFS

Apple pulled developers off OS X to try to get iPhone out the door.

As a result, not only was Leopard late, it also shipped without some features that were promised. The ones that stick out most are read-write ZFS and NAS-capable Time Machine.

For the moment, OS X only supports read-only mounting of ZFS volumes.

On the other hand, iTunes supports NFS mounted libraries, so E could do like you and use a Solaris controlled ZFS volume across the wire.

Edited at 2007-11-24 09:23 pm (UTC)
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)
Tomas Gallucci
schpydurx at 2007-11-24 21:48 (UTC) (Link)
For reasons I can't entirely articulate, I chose to unmount my iTunes volume from the PowerMac G4 and power down the box last night.
You'd should be thankful that I wasn't around for this charade. I would have interrogated you The Good Shepherd style.


Most of it is backed up.
You're the IT professional. You're the one who takes care of incalculable amounts of important sensitive data each day, yet you don't back your data up with the same care? How can one rule the city if he have not rule over his own household?


On CDROM.
You miserable, lying fuck! You said that Read-Write capability and super-fast SCSI interface should've been the future of removable storage over CD-R. and I''ve still got my Jazz drive, and by God they'll have to pull that from my cold, dead hands! I'll never go backwards!

A lot of damned good that did you! And then, to add insult to injury, you claim that you backed up on CDs? What kind of a hypocritical prick are you? Go buy 66 more Jazz drives.


The idea is once I backup/restore everything, this new .5TB drive can become my Time Machine.
I had Time Machine from day 0 of miniMax0r.

30 hours to transfer.
Where are you Jazz drives now?

Leopard is fast and beautiful and I love the new dock and everything about it.
I thought you had previously updated teh max0r to Leopard, so I don't understand why this sentence appears in this post. Surely this wasn't the first time that you had seen the new Dock. Since you don't expand on this sentence, the only thing that makes any sense to me as to why it would be featured here is that you were trying to say something quickly and witty about Mac so that you could keep up with your exposition to staccato theme.

So I reinstall, and everything works great. drax0r suggests reinstalling the update, which craters my box..
Now, I'm not going to say that drax0r is an idiot and in fact I can see his logic: maybe it was something that you did to fuck up the upgrade, so if we try a fresh install that will remove you from the equation. But at the same time, with less then a week to go till the party, if 10.5 was working great after reinstallation, why bother with the upgrade until after the party? There wasn't anything in the upgrade that you absolutely had to have for the party, was there?

So I reinstall, and everything works great. drax0r suggests reinstalling the update, which craters my box.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, this time expecting different results.

Footer Image
Are you making fun of Mac with this image or is this a graphical representation of you saying If I were smarter, this would be easier?

Edited at 2007-11-24 09:53 pm (UTC)
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-24 22:20 (UTC) (Link)
I would have interrogated you The Good Shepherd style.
Though I haven't yet seen the movie, I am anticipating doing so one of these days.

How can one rule the city if he have not rule over his own household?
Excellent point! And this one, I know the answer to: One Million Dollars.

You miserable, lying fuck!
Those weren't copies of soundtracks I made for my father, that would be illegal. He does, however, store my offsite backups for me.

I had Time Machine from day 0 of miniMax0r.
Only if you installed Leopard that first day. Its not compatible with Tiger, and you sir, purchased your mini with Tiger on it.

Where are you Jazz drives now?
Funny enough, the PowerMac does have an internal Zip drive installed in it. Ha!

I thought you had previously updated teh max0r to Leopard, so I don't understand why this sentence appears in this post.
Because you're wrong.

Surely this wasn't the first time that you had seen the new Dock.
Pray tell, WTF else would I have played with it?

Since you don't expand on this sentence, the only thing that makes any sense to me as to why it would be featured here is that you were trying to say something quickly and witty about Mac so that you could keep up with your exposition to staccato theme.
We've talked about you thinking before, and how you should not.

There wasn't anything in the upgrade that you absolutely had to have for the party, was there?
Since the playlist & setup for the party is on the PowerMac G4 in the garage and not on my mini, these two things don't have anything to do with each other.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, this time expecting different results.
Agreed. This time, however, we installed only the 10.5.1 update, and none of the other associated software updates bundled with it.

Are you making fun of Mac with this image...
Yes. I made it from scratch for this post.


(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)
drax0r
drax0r at 2007-11-24 22:23 (UTC) (Link)
The difference is that the for the 2nd Leopard install I had him chose the 'Arhive and Install' option which backs up your user prefs and data and does a clean install.

Afterwards, it was late, so I suggested seeing if, after the clean install, the 10.5.1 upgrade would show the same behavior. Worst case scenario is that it does crash the box, you stick the Leopard disk in, start a new fresh install, and go to bed.

It's significant because we now have lots more information about the conditions contributing to the crash.

Eric, being far more practical, just sees it as a futile exercise in redoing something that we know breaks it.
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snapper521 at 2007-11-26 01:09 (UTC) (Link)

Black Friday

Sorry? *shrug* Tomas tried to read this post to me, but I don't understand anything other then you "crashed" and had to go buy a new drive. :-P blah.

Sorry I'm so computer illiterate... that will change eventually. Just might not be for a little while. :-(
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-26 01:14 (UTC) (Link)

Re: Black Friday

Mac. It just works ;)
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)
CeltManX, Devlin O' Coileáin
celtmanx at 2007-11-26 05:48 (UTC) (Link)
"So I reinstall, and everything works great. drax0r suggests reinstalling the update, which craters my box."

Sounds like that sugestion to use an optical mouse on a glass table top!!!
(Reply) (Thread)
ehowton
ehowton at 2007-11-26 05:51 (UTC) (Link)
Remind me to never get that drunk again.
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