I’m back!

Tell you what: these were probably the three toughest days in my life. Before telling you what happened, first of all, my sincere thanks go to Gilles, Serge and Raff for their tips! And, if he ever reads this blog, many thanks to my dad without whom I still would sit in front of a black screen.

A short note before telling you the whole story: the apps I’ve used were of course installed on a bootable cd. ;-)

So, what happened? As I already wrote in the previous post, my filesystem was severely damaged, not to say: it was completely broke, which means no chance at all to get the system back to work. Nevertheless, I’ve tried that with several different methods – hope dies last.

Step 1: Tiger Install DVD, started Disk Utility. Certainly the first application everyone chooses if the system doesn’t work as it should. Neither verifying, nor repairing, nor rebuilding succeeded, I got a fatal error every time.

Step 2: Safe boot. Damn it, the system doesn’t boot at all, so how do get it to boot in safe mode? A question which led me to…

Step 3: Drive Genius. A nice app that I’ve used to defragment my harddisk. It can also be used to repair a system. But, it totally failed in doing so in my case. I’ve defragmented my disk, which curiously worked, but didn’t help me of course. (Hope dies last…)

Step 4: My dad came up with Disk Warrior. Ah, the magic tool that could rebuild any system! Well, almost. Because mine, it couldn’t rebuild.

Step 5: Ask someone for help. Gilles told me that if the filesystem’s broke, there was only one alternative left: re-partition my harddisk. That would of course have meant losing all of my files, some of which I hadn’t backuped yet. But, as I was told, I could try get my files back using Ubuntu. So I downloaded the ~650 mb Ubuntu LiveCD on my dad’s computer.

Step 6: Boot in Single User mode. (Why didn’t I think about this earlier?) Observation: Shit. In Single user mode, the keyboard’s American English. So back to my dad’s computer, googled an image of such a keyboard and back to my iBook. Typed /sbin/fsck -fy. Got a message: fatal error. Another try, same result.

In the mean time, Ubuntu was fully downloaded so I could at least boot from the LiveCD and use Firefox to search for help on some forums. I could finally check my mails again. Omfg, what a spam! Anyone needs a hundred million dollars? I won so much money in the last couple of days… ;-)

Step 7: Near to complete desperation. So I decided to make a post on the blog, maybe anyone would come up with an idea how I could fix this.

Step 8: Data Rescue. My dad came up with his zip drive, as I needed an external disk to save the recovered files onto. But, as most of you know, a zip drive to place a whole 60gb harrdisk onto it is rare, if not inexistent. So, yesterday afternoon my dad and I went to a computer shop, and got a LaCie 250 GB Porsche Edition external harddisk. What a nice clean design! (picture). Back at home: format the disk, plug it onto my iBook, boot from the Data Rescue CD and run Data Rescue. Long story short: it worked! Some mp3s and videos are lost, but for what concerns the mp3s they were free downloads so I can download them again and for what concerns the videos, some of them I have published on naischtnotz.net (I was never so happy having that site) and the others were not so important that I would cry.

Step 9: Re-partition my harddisk, reinstall the system.

Step 10: Open a bottle of champagne. Mental note to myself: buy my dad a big box of chocolates.

Conclusion: I LOVE Data Rescue! It already saved the pictures that got lost on my digital camera back in July last year when the card got a heat stroke in Lloret and deleted all of the images and now it saved my whole hard disk.

There are however good things about this experience:
– I got an external harddisk;
– I will never ever forget to backup important files;
– I learned a lot about the Mac OS X system;
– I worked on a Linux for the first time (and I don’t like the Ubuntu interface).

Now all I still have to do is finish installing all the applications and I can resume working seriously on naischtnotz.net. There’ll be a bunch of new funny videos going online during the next week! :-)

And now finally I’ll get some restful sleep…

(Mental note to myself: don’t write a post at 4 o’clock, I bet there are a bunch of mistakes. :))