Tech Tool Pro Hoses My PowerMac
I’m fairly disciplined about keeping backups. My preferred method has been to use Disk Utility’s Restore function to back up my entire boot hard disk on every machine. I handle incremental backups by copying specific folders to my network hard drive in between major backups using Disk Utility. When Apple’s Time Machine gets here, I’ll more than likely use it to perform even better backups.
Yesterday, I bought a Maxtor 300 GB External Hard Disk so I could back up the boot drive on my G5 PowerMac which I had just reconfigured as my “prime” machine and is also some 300GB big. When the I hooked the external drive up and tried to use Disk Utility’s Restore function to clone the PowerMac’s drive to it, the copying terminated with an error message telling me a file was missing. After getting the message twice, I ran First Aid’s “Repair Disk” function, which also terminated with an error message that pointed to a B-Tree error. A second try resulted in the same result, so I turned to MicroMat’s Tech Tool Pro. Booting up on its CD, I ran its Volume and File Repair functions.
That was a Big Mistake!
Once it completed, I rebooted the PowerMac on its own hard disk. The Apple logo appeared, followed quickly thereafter with a message telling me I needed to hold the power button down to restart my machine. Another reboot got me the same result. Kernel panic!
I rebooted using the Tech Tool CD and tried to use its tools to repair the hard disk again. No joy. The system booted thereafter with the same message and problem as before.
I figured the only way to recover from that was to reinstall OS X using its “Archive and Install” option. But when I tried to do it, I discovered the Installer could not find the machine’s boot disk, only Hard Disk 2. What now?
All my disk utilities were seeing both drives; but since Tech Tool was not going to solve the problem, I beat feet down to the local Comp USA and bought a copy of DiskWarrior. I had always heard it was good at recovering this kind of thing. Not this time. But it did tell me that the disk was not recoverable because another disk utility had written over critical directory information. Nice!!! A hundred bucks for DiskWarrior down the drain (at least for now)…
I had backed up my PowerMac with an external FW400 hard drive, so I attached it to my PowerMac and rebooted, holding down the Option key. The PowerMac showed me three options for booting. One was the original but hosed OS X hard drive, one was the OS X Tiger DVD, and the other was the OS X installed external Hard Drive. I chose the latter, and the PowerMac booted up on it. I then used Disk Utility to first erase the PowerMac’s original boot hard drive and then used the Restore function to copy everything on the external drive to the PowerMac. That would take me back to the state of the PowerMac before I moved all my stuff onto it. It took an hour and a half or so for that to happen.
Once I had the PowerMac up and running on its own hard drive, I installed the Mac OS 10.4.8 Combo Update from a DVD copy and then ran Software Update until I had pulled down every update there was. That got the operating system, my Apple iLife and iWork applications, and my Apple Pro applications back up to speed. With that done, I began copying my user data from its storage on my network hard drive and from a FW 400 external drive that still contained the last backup of my Intel iMac, including my iTunes and iPhoto libraries. That took several more hours to complete.
With nearly all my data recovered, I inventoried my applications and discovered I needed to reinstall Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 as well as InDesign and GoLive CS. While I was expecting otherwise, I was hoping the CS2 applications would activate since I was reinstalling them on the same machine. They did, happily; and I then ran the Adobe Updater to download the patches that would take all my stuff to the latest versions.
I launched Word to test it out; and though it booted properly, I got a message telling me that an error had occurred when trying to launch Microsoft Framework. Traveling to Microsoft’s support site turned out to be a waste of time; there was nothing that gave me any insight about how to fix that. A Google search also turned up nothing substantive. The easiest thing to do was to reinstall Office, so I popped its CD into my Superdrive and dragged the Office 2004 folder to the Applications folder on my hard disk. The system dutifully copied everything over. I then launched Word and did not get the error message, and the Microsoft Updater took over and downloaded the office 11.2.5 update. With that installed, all I needed to do was to fetch some of the document templates I had built; and I copied them from my iMac’s backup to the same folder on the PowerMac.
At this point, my losses look pretty small. I discovered I was missing a few photos out of my iPhoto library, and my iTunes library had everything except for the last 4 episodes of Eureka I downloaded. They are on my iPod, so I may try to recover them from there this evening. I’m also missing a couple of movies I encoded myself, so I’ll have to spend some time making copies of them again. But the next thing I intend to do is backup the PM’s main hard drive like I had been trying to do when all this started. I’m going to look at the backup software that came with the Maxtor external drive and see if it might help me construct a better backup system than I’ve got until Time Machine arrives via Leopard. But I’ll make sure I have some kind of complete backup before I go to bed tonight. I’m not going to risk going to sleep without one, lest I wake and have to reload everything from scratch…again!
You can bet I won’t use Tech Tool Pro for any more disk repairs. I’m going to stick with DiskWarrior. Tech Tool has some other comprehensive tests that seem to work fairly well, but I’m not sure if I’m going to leave it on the machine or remove it altogether.
Despite the losses, the set up I have now is the better one. I’ve been able to reload my operating system and data and not lose much, i.e., kind of a fresh start of sorts. I’ll be spending some time tweaking things to get them back to exactly where they were and more time backing up; but when I’m done, I’ll have comprehensive backups for everything.
At least for a hard disk failure, I can pop in a new one and go from there. If I still had an Intel iMac when that happened, I’d have to turn it into my Apple Care provider to do the same thing.
Yesterday, I bought a Maxtor 300 GB External Hard Disk so I could back up the boot drive on my G5 PowerMac which I had just reconfigured as my “prime” machine and is also some 300GB big. When the I hooked the external drive up and tried to use Disk Utility’s Restore function to clone the PowerMac’s drive to it, the copying terminated with an error message telling me a file was missing. After getting the message twice, I ran First Aid’s “Repair Disk” function, which also terminated with an error message that pointed to a B-Tree error. A second try resulted in the same result, so I turned to MicroMat’s Tech Tool Pro. Booting up on its CD, I ran its Volume and File Repair functions.
That was a Big Mistake!
Once it completed, I rebooted the PowerMac on its own hard disk. The Apple logo appeared, followed quickly thereafter with a message telling me I needed to hold the power button down to restart my machine. Another reboot got me the same result. Kernel panic!
I rebooted using the Tech Tool CD and tried to use its tools to repair the hard disk again. No joy. The system booted thereafter with the same message and problem as before.
I figured the only way to recover from that was to reinstall OS X using its “Archive and Install” option. But when I tried to do it, I discovered the Installer could not find the machine’s boot disk, only Hard Disk 2. What now?
All my disk utilities were seeing both drives; but since Tech Tool was not going to solve the problem, I beat feet down to the local Comp USA and bought a copy of DiskWarrior. I had always heard it was good at recovering this kind of thing. Not this time. But it did tell me that the disk was not recoverable because another disk utility had written over critical directory information. Nice!!! A hundred bucks for DiskWarrior down the drain (at least for now)…
I had backed up my PowerMac with an external FW400 hard drive, so I attached it to my PowerMac and rebooted, holding down the Option key. The PowerMac showed me three options for booting. One was the original but hosed OS X hard drive, one was the OS X Tiger DVD, and the other was the OS X installed external Hard Drive. I chose the latter, and the PowerMac booted up on it. I then used Disk Utility to first erase the PowerMac’s original boot hard drive and then used the Restore function to copy everything on the external drive to the PowerMac. That would take me back to the state of the PowerMac before I moved all my stuff onto it. It took an hour and a half or so for that to happen.
Once I had the PowerMac up and running on its own hard drive, I installed the Mac OS 10.4.8 Combo Update from a DVD copy and then ran Software Update until I had pulled down every update there was. That got the operating system, my Apple iLife and iWork applications, and my Apple Pro applications back up to speed. With that done, I began copying my user data from its storage on my network hard drive and from a FW 400 external drive that still contained the last backup of my Intel iMac, including my iTunes and iPhoto libraries. That took several more hours to complete.
With nearly all my data recovered, I inventoried my applications and discovered I needed to reinstall Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 as well as InDesign and GoLive CS. While I was expecting otherwise, I was hoping the CS2 applications would activate since I was reinstalling them on the same machine. They did, happily; and I then ran the Adobe Updater to download the patches that would take all my stuff to the latest versions.
I launched Word to test it out; and though it booted properly, I got a message telling me that an error had occurred when trying to launch Microsoft Framework. Traveling to Microsoft’s support site turned out to be a waste of time; there was nothing that gave me any insight about how to fix that. A Google search also turned up nothing substantive. The easiest thing to do was to reinstall Office, so I popped its CD into my Superdrive and dragged the Office 2004 folder to the Applications folder on my hard disk. The system dutifully copied everything over. I then launched Word and did not get the error message, and the Microsoft Updater took over and downloaded the office 11.2.5 update. With that installed, all I needed to do was to fetch some of the document templates I had built; and I copied them from my iMac’s backup to the same folder on the PowerMac.
At this point, my losses look pretty small. I discovered I was missing a few photos out of my iPhoto library, and my iTunes library had everything except for the last 4 episodes of Eureka I downloaded. They are on my iPod, so I may try to recover them from there this evening. I’m also missing a couple of movies I encoded myself, so I’ll have to spend some time making copies of them again. But the next thing I intend to do is backup the PM’s main hard drive like I had been trying to do when all this started. I’m going to look at the backup software that came with the Maxtor external drive and see if it might help me construct a better backup system than I’ve got until Time Machine arrives via Leopard. But I’ll make sure I have some kind of complete backup before I go to bed tonight. I’m not going to risk going to sleep without one, lest I wake and have to reload everything from scratch…again!
You can bet I won’t use Tech Tool Pro for any more disk repairs. I’m going to stick with DiskWarrior. Tech Tool has some other comprehensive tests that seem to work fairly well, but I’m not sure if I’m going to leave it on the machine or remove it altogether.
Despite the losses, the set up I have now is the better one. I’ve been able to reload my operating system and data and not lose much, i.e., kind of a fresh start of sorts. I’ll be spending some time tweaking things to get them back to exactly where they were and more time backing up; but when I’m done, I’ll have comprehensive backups for everything.
At least for a hard disk failure, I can pop in a new one and go from there. If I still had an Intel iMac when that happened, I’d have to turn it into my Apple Care provider to do the same thing.
posted by Andy Foster at
12:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home