What's up, doc?

[johan]

Whew. Holidays are over, and they were rather hectic.

First, there was the Scottish science fiction World convention. My third Worldcon, and definitely the best so far. I managed to see some programming, and had a generally excellent time. Perhaps I didn't meet so many new people, but I prefer adding just a few new friends at a con rather than "stretching myself out", so to speak. Lots of good real ale in the fanroom bar, much appreciated.

Then ten days of touring Scotland. Good weather, mostly, only excellent B&B's, not a single grumpy old lady at all this time. B&B's, hotels, car costs and eating & drinking out each day made a very ghastly dent in our finances, though, so it will take the rest of the year to catch up again. This type of holiday is so much more expensive than a charter week or two in a resort. Being in a car ten days in a row with argumentative and babbling science fiction fans was fun, but I don't think I could have taken a single day more. I'm sure all of us felt relieved when the trip was over. I haven't overdosed on people for a long time, but this was definitely it.

Skye is still the most beautiful place I've been to, and I got to see new parts of it this time.

Back home again last Friday and picked up dmw and dalmeny (D&J) at the railway station the following afternoon. (Two Australian fans travelling around to meet European fans.) On Saturday evening some local fans came over to our place for some traditional chilli con carne, to meet D&J, and on Sunday we walked around in Uppsala, finishing with a visit to Café Hugo. They stayed two nights with us, and were the most thoughtful house guests we've ever had, helpful and quiet. Our house will always be open to them.

Then yesterday a hard disk crashed. Bad blocks, and the computer doesn't recognize it. Apple's own disk utility disowns it completely, and a disk repair application I downloaded takes forever scanning it, spending an eternity trying to decipher each bad block. I wonder whether Disk Warrior will be able to do something. Ideally I would like to borrow a copy first, and then buy it if it helped. Paying $91 for a program I don't know whether it will help feels painful. Nothing crucial on that disk, but a number of digital photographs we don't want to lose. And perhaps other stuff I can't remember. Our backupping has been spotty...

Sigh. Well, back to work.

Comments

[guyelfkin.livejournal.com]

Then yesterday a hard disk crashed.

Ugh! What a welcome home!

I hope you get it sorted.

Teddy

[hanspersson.livejournal.com]

*gnnn* Hard disk crashes are definitely one of the modern age bogeymen that I fear. I haven't had one yet, though. My backup is probably better than spotty, but still far from perfect.

[kjn]

Try Data Rescue. It worked excellently under Mac OS 9. IIRC, you can try it before you buy as well.

[jophan.livejournal.com]

Yes, I downloaded it. It works fine, I think. Hard to be sure. After the first 43,000,000 blocks it runs into the sector which is damaged (and I'm beginning to suspect real mechanical damage) and slows down. If it continues the same way it does the first three hours after running into the damaged sector, my calculations told me it would require 23.5 days to finish the scan. The app itself was more optimistic, and thought it would only need six more hours.

Of course, since after 1.5 hours it thought it would need only 3 more hours, and after 3.5 hours had upped that to 6 hours, I'm not trusting the algorithm. It seems to be based on how long it has taken it to get where it is when the calculation is performed, from starting, while I base my calculation on the performance the last three hours only.

After those 3.5 hours, having covered 43% of the disk, it has found 382,000 files. When done, the manual says it can retrieve them, but not file or folder names. I'm not sure I would ever have the time needed to go through all those nameless files trying to figure out what is what.

I did get hold of Disk Warrior. It looks at the disk, says "I can't read it" and that's it. I didn't realize that Disk Warrior can do nothing if the disk is physically damaged.