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MacHome Hottips - November 9, 1998
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HARD DRIVE OF THE DAMNED

Several of you may remember several months back when I suggested to all of you that you should make regular backups of your hard disks or, at the very least, backing up your important data files. I'm here to admit to you now that, as far as my PowerBook goes, I had been less than diligent about making regular backups. There are reasons, even good ones. It's a pain to connect a Zip drive to my PowerBook. It requires a little extra effort and frankly, I didn't take the time to do it. Fortunately, most of my critical data was backed-up on another Mac that I own. Although my fine archive of Hottips is - well... gone.

So... what tools does a foolish man use to bring his ailing Mac back to life? Standby while we take a look at what's necessary to get your system back up and running.

Since most of what I do is done on a PowerBook without a floppy disk (can you say iMac?) what I did may be slightly different than what you may have to do. Nonetheless the necessities are pretty much the same.

First, I needed to check my disk to see if there was some way to recover the data. This required three tools, one part hardware and three parts software:

     Zip Drive
     TechTool Pro
     OS 8.5

Once I could boot my PowerBook using the Zip disk I attempted to repair my hard drive. Using TechTool Pro. Unfortunately my worst fears were realized, TechTool was unable to even see the disk. Although, for some strange reason, the Mac OS would recognize the disk upon initial startup. At that time I was met with a message stating that the drive could not be read, would I like to initialize it. I rebooted my Mac and initialized the drive.

Once the disk was initialized I used TechTool to check the drive for problems. Fortunately there appeared to be no problems with the disk itself. Apparently some other problem had occurred, most likely of my own doing, that caused the drive to go south. (I've occasional messed with files that are better left untouched. I once completely wiped out a database that I needed to provide my employer with a report the next morning. I spent a good portion of the evening reconstructing the damage and was somehow able to recreate the necessary items. Of course, that was using DOS. An evening of complete bliss I can assure you.) Now it was time to reinstall the System software.

As I pointed out before, with no CDROM or floppy disk, I had to come up with another way to get the System software on my PowerBook. The only logical solution was to use AppleTalk to connect my PowerBook to my 5215CD. Fortunately, when I was trashing unnecessary files I was smart enough to keep all the networking files. After starting File Sharing on my desktop computer I could connect to the OS 8.5 CD and begin installing OS 8.5 on my PowerBook. Since AppleTalk is rather slow this process took about 3 hours. I trotted off to bed and let the job commence on its own. When I woke the Powerbook was working normally.

To date I still don't have all my software reinstalled. The important stuff, like email and Internet access, has been taken care of as well as ClarisWorks and a complement of necessary utilities.

     DragThing
     ColorSwitch and SnapzPro
     PowerSwitch and
     FinderPop

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