a view through my own eyes

A couple of weeks ago, mrspao’s laptop died much to the annoyance of mrspao as it was full of her photos and stuff. Most of which were backed up elsewhere – but some were not. Investigation revealed that there was a disk error, whether just filesystem corruption or something worse was unknown at the time as the laptop failed to boot.

After trying to boot in ‘target mode’ making the laptop an expensive firewire disk and mounting it on one of my Macs – revealed that something was seriously wrong as the filesystem failed to mount. A rummage round for the AppleCare CD for my laptop revealed a bootable CD that boots into TechTool – this at least recognised the disk and reckoned it could restore around 25% of the disk but not which bits of the disk. It also confirmed physical failure on the disk. So we abandoned that plan and kept it as a last resort.

At this point it was time for some serious Googling – this revealed that the tool for Mac disk maintenance is called Disk Warrior. So given the cost and balancing it against the worth of the data (priceless kitten pictures) we ordered a copy.

A day or so later it arrived, turns out that you get a bootable CD that boots a very limited version of OSX with customised disk drivers that bypasses the usual filesystem drivers and can read your disk directly, so we set the thing going. An hour or so later a report is generated confirming that there are physical errors on the disk, but also usefully providing a file browser so you can rummage round and see exactly what is available. In this case mrspao’s data was all accessible, so connecting an external USB drive which automounted and then copying the files off through the file browser (no not the Finder as this is not even running) mrspao’s data is all saved.

Phew, and I become a hero husband.

In addition to this Disk Warrior when installed on the native machine – defragments an HFS+ Journalled volume, fixes up permissions and broken plist files which on my own laptop has improved disk performance no end.

At the end of the day Disk Warrior is not a cheap bit of software but it did do exactly what it claimed to and has proven worth every penny. Overall I am fairly certain that it was more cost effective to purchase and do the work myself (of which there was not a lot) than sending the laptop off to a service centre. I cannot recommend Disk Warrior highly enough.

It has been an odd few months, yup nearly three months since I last blogged and to be honest I just haven’t felt like bothering. No not like that, I am not depressed or anything like that I just really have had no interest in blogging. The same to be honest can be said for taking photographs as well.

There have been a couple of occasions when I nearly deleted the blog altogether but decided not to as I am aware that it gets read from time to time with people looking for cornea transplant related things, so probably best to keep it if it helps get someone through the uncertainty etc.

So time to catch up a bit.

Sam and I went to Paris for a weekend, I was ill – the first clue was I didn’t order beer with my lunch, the second was I didn’t eat my lunch. Come the evening I had a temperature, fever, and ached everywhere. Later that same evening I was hallucinating (I am not saying what!) and spent half the night in the bathroom. Returning home the following day was survivable (obviously), and further investigation when Sam got ill on the Monday revealed that we both had swine flu and that is despite my best efforts at eating bacon sarnies.

A close friend who is deaf moved in for a month and had a cochlear implant, she can now hear for the first time in over twenty years – neither Sam, myself or most of her work colleagues have ever been able to have a conversation with her before. Utterly astonishing.

In the last three months we did get a kitten, the black one called Sirius, Minerva his sister turned out to be a brother with lung problems so Regulus is no more. Sirius however is an utter bundle of fun and makes the other cats look so old. I think tomorrow will be Christmas tree day, so no fragile ornaments on the tree this year.

Work has been crazy busy, it has been a year since I changed job and I have no regrets about leaving one university for another. The entire DNS infrastructure over our four sites was swapped on my first anniversary to complete phase one of a project, the DHCP service over the sites gets completed in early January – so nothing important that could break almost everything should it go wrong. Kinda hoping for teflon coated trousers for Christmas.

George has been mostly good on the whole, this had an infection/virus that turned the eye red overnight but that is being treated now and surgery is being booked to sort out a couple of other issues with the same eye. The week has been stressful with George and now it is time just to flomp.

The electronic part of the Enigma-E has been completed (thank you mrspao) and worked first time (yes I do have pictures), with luck I will soon have time to start building the case for it. The Enigma-Uhr is not working though and the battery is flat in my multimeter so this will have to wait until I have been to Maplins (dangerous) which has just this week opened locally (yay) next to a KFC (very very bad).

My aim to read a book a week this year was scrapped due to apathy, but now is gaining a head of steam, I will make up a list at some point to see quite how bad it it was this year.