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Hardware failure (and why I’m glad I’m prepared)

:: Saturday, November 29th, 2008 @ 10:13:04 pm

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I’ve seen three disks fail here on the ship in the past two days; it’s terrifying to think about computer failure during such a long time out at sea.

About 15 minutes ago, I had a drive failure scare. My Mac froze suddenly while I was working in Aperture, and I had to force a hard reboot. When it started up again, I got the dreaded flashing question mark folder, and no amount of restarting the machine allowed for a successful boot. Luckily, I travel with DiskWarrior 4 on a USB stick1, and it managed to rebuild the volume successfully. I was so relieved.

What if I hadn’t had a copy of DiskWarrior handy? I might have been seriously screwed.

In my computer bag, I travel with the following things:

  1. DiskWarrior on USB flash drive
  2. Mac OS 10.5 Leopard installer on USB flash drive
  3. Full, bootable backup on external drive (encrypted)
  4. Useful software installers on an external drive
  5. Numerous external drives
  6. Numerous USB flash drives

If you are a frequent traveler and don’t travel with DiskWarrior, an operating system installer disc, and an external drive to which you backup frequently, you are asking for trouble!

  1. I don’t have an optical drive in my notebook anymore, so I transferred my copy of DiskWarrior onto a USB flash drive. ↩

| M/V Steve Irwin | link | trackback | Nov 29, 2008 22:13:04
  • http://tow.com Adam

    I just had a drive mysteriously stop working myself today. I finished a SuperDuper backup of my MBP and was going to backup the iMac to the same drive (two partitions). When I plugged the drive into the iMac, it said that the disk was unreadable! Plugging the drive into the MBP returned the same error. Sadly, my version of Disk Warrior is old, so I reformatted the drive and am starting the SuperDuper copy again.

  • cor

    Eric, I combine the install image and the backup on 1 disk. Just made 2 partitions, both bootable. Gotta get myself diskwarrior though.

  • http://deepdreams.com Rogier

    New Macbook and MB Pro’s have a very easy to swap HD. If / when you get one of these it might be handy to have a ready to go back-up drive to pop in there. While keeping track of changes with time machine or an other back-up app. Just put the drive in place. Hit restore from back-up and go for diner / dive… Still having diskwarior on a stick as well as bootable copy of Leopard is very very helpful indeed.

  • Pingback: Around the web | alexking.org

  • Tae Kim

    Hey Eric, do you just copy over diskwarrior icon to your USB flash drive or do you disk image it? Any reason to use a USB flash drive vs. just having it on a external bootable HD? And then plug it in when you boot off an external HD to get it to work?

    Also how do you put a Leopard installer on a USB drive? Do you make it into a DVD image?

  • Tae Kim

    How often to you run Diskwarrior? Monthly? I just bought a copy today because you recommended it. I can’t afford to lose data. I think I’m going to run Diskwarrior 1) rebuild file directoy 2) File/repair disk permissions+check files every month before I do a superduper backup. I also have a TimeMachine USB ext. drive going too for double backup coverage.

  • Tae Kim

    Sorry for the 3rd message in a row. Someone said I should run AppleJack, then run Disk Warrior, and then do my monthly SuperDuper backup. What do you think of that as a monthly routine? Is AppleJack known to be good?

  • http://echeng.com echeng

    Tae – I only run DiskWarrior when I have some kind of failure. Google searches should answer your other questions about putting bootable volumes on USB drives…
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