Much to my surprise, I am now the proud owner of a 300GB backup drive for my Mac Mini.

The story started earlier this week, when I decided to get back to the project of digitizing our Hi-8 tapes before they (or the camcorder) gave up the ghost. So I fired up iMovie and copied the first tape that came to hand.

Except that I’d forgotten to rewind it, so there was a 13-minute segment that was dubbed. No problem; I rewound the tape and copied that part, too. But then I wanted to move the clips into the proper order so I wouldn’t have to remember what I’d done when I finally got around to editing.

Again, no problem. Until I tried saving the rearranged file. The progress bar zipped along for a few seconds, then came to a complete halt (with the spinning beachball in place of the cursor). And I heard a ticking noise from the disk. And the noise continued. And the progress bar didn’t move. And the app was unresponsive to the “Cancel” button.

So I rebooted and tried again. Same results. I even downloaded smartmontools, only to discover that they don’t work against an external Firewire-attached drive. I did wonder how I was able to do the download and compile while the disk was having problems, but it was getting late, so I turned everything off for the night, including my brain. That was Wednesday.

Thursday, I stopped at CompUSA on the way home and picked up the special of the day, a Maxtor 300GB drive (which, for reasons best known to Maxtor, came with a 20GB “bonus”, making it 320GB). I put it in my external USB drive case (which I’d bought in the course of recovering a failed disk on a TiVo) and went to work.

I’d done some research, hoping to find a way to recover the bad sector on my old drive, and there didn’t seem to be one — but The X Lab suggested it would be a good idea to “zero” the new disk before using it, so that the system would find and bypass any bad sectors on the drive. So I started that process and went to sleep.

This morning, I fired up SuperDuper, as recommended at UNEASYsilence, to copy the old disk to the new one. Then I went off to work. When I returned, the copy had finished, so I swapped the new drive into the miniStack; it booted, and I was back in business — back to iMovie to continue where I left off.

When I went to save the movie, the same thing happened. Except this time, the ticking was quieter. And it finally hit me: copying 22GB takes a long time. And the progress bar in iMovie doesn’t reflect the amount of data moved, just the number of clips touched. And I almost certainly didn’t have any bad sectors on my old disk — it was just doing a lot of seeking.

Oh, well; I needed a place to take backups anyway.

But next time, I’ll make sure to rewind the tape before I copy it.

About a month ago, I wrote about problems I was having with my NewerTech miniStack’s Firewire connection (namely that there didn’t seem to be one, at least not consistently). I eventually got around to calling their tech support (high praises to them for being open on Saturday!), and after doing some diagnosis, they gave me an RMA. In the meantime, I’d mounted my external disk in a spare USB enclosure I’d bought to solve a problem on some other computer, so I could get to all my data.

Friday, the unit arrived home, with a note saying that the internal Firewire bridge had been bad and they’d replaced it. So I moved the disk over, and, sure enough, it mounted just fine.

Then I tried to boot from it — and all I got was the grey screen of death. So I tried again, this time using Apple-V to get the console log displayed (is there some way to make that permanent? I find system messages to be reassuring, not scary), and found that, just as had been happening before I sent the unit in for repair, the boot failed with these two messages:

Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying /sbin/mach_init
Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88

I took everything apart, put the drive back into the USB enclosure, and made sure that /sbin on my internal and external drives were the same. Then I put it back into the miniStack…no dice.

I couldn’t call tech support, since they’re not open on Sunday. So I did the next best thing — I Googled the messages. And I discovered that I was not alone.

And now the problem wasn’t hardware — it was software. Apparently my installation of OS X 10.4.7 on the external disk hadn’t quite succeeded, but I didn’t realize it. And in the meantime, 10.4.8 had arrived.

To make a long story short, the recovery procedure was:

1. Download the latest Combo Update from Apple, putting it on the internal disk as /tmp/update.dmg
2. Boot from the Install DVD
3. Bring up Disk Utility from the menu
4. Verify the external volume and, after discovering problems, repair the external volume
5. Bring up terminal
6. Mount the update image:
   1. /Volumes/Internal/usr/bin/open /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app /Volumes/Internal/tmp/update.dmg
   2. Click on the update.dmg in Disk Utility’s left navigator
7. Install the update:
   1. /Volumes/Internal/usr/bin/open /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app /Volumes/whatever-it-was-called.pkg
8. Wait a few minutes for the install to finish
9. Reboot

When the machine rebooted, it was with OSX 10.4.8 from the external disk. *whew*

I thought this thing was going to be an appliance….

My thanks to everyone who’d documented their experiences with similar problems, especially those who posted to the Washington Post‘s “Security Fix“. The discussion on OSXFAQ was also helpful.