Dented Reality Notes

Their keyboard navigation sucks. I mean certain programs have great keyboard shortcuts and all, but I'm talking standard stuff, like tab between buttons in a window and hit enter/space to do something. Launch a file from Finder. There are some basic things that they're missing here, and it's killing me.

Having said that, I did just buy my second Mac laptop (15" PowerBook G4), which I totally love; except for this horrendous shortcoming. And if it's possible, it actually got worse between my iBook and this PowerBook. A bunch of the programs which got updates have now stopped offering the alternative default outlined buttons in dialogs which I could hit space to activate - which was pretty much the only thing that was better than Windows' keyboard nav.

Maybe I'm missing something.

UPDATE 2005-12-13: So I figured out how to 'launch' an item that's highlighted in Finder, and it's almost worse knowing than it was not. Apple-down-arrow. WTF???

WARNING: Explicit language ahead!

I'd like to officially put out a big "fuck you" to Apple today, and here's why...

1. Imported some photos into iPhoto this morning, and deleted them from my camera when I was done (never had a problem with that before). I rotated a few of them because they were around the wrong way, and then iPhoto decided that it would lose track of a bunch of them, and corrupt the originals. I have 8,415 photos in my library, and now it looks like new imports are going to be a problem. Fuck you iPhoto.
2. iTunes said it needed to be updated, so I went ahead and updated it. Re-opened iTunes, and it decided my library file wasn't valid, so it created a new one, and lost track of all of my playlists. Fuck you too iTunes.
3. I emptied my Trash yesterday. I don't know how much stuff was in there, but there was a lot. Next time I tried to shut down, FileVault wanted to reclaim a bunch of space. No problem, does that every time I shut down. It tried for over an hour, before I turned off my PowerBook and gave up. I can't turn FileVault off either, because it claims that I need a spare 4,088 GIGABYTES (!) of space to create an unencrypted copy of my home folder. Now every time I try to restart/shut down, same thing happens, and it sits there for a long time - so I can't shut down cleanly. Also, a big "fuck you" to FileVault.
4. And now, for the grand finale. Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update. Wow. Complete the update "successfully". Restart. No Keychain. No Dock. No Accounts in Mail. No application preferences in pretty much anything. In short - fucked. Overall - a MASSIVE FUCK YOU to the Apple Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go waste half my day reconfiguring everything because Apple decided my settings weren't important.

So I wasted around 6 hours trying to get a Hitachi Travelstar 5K80 to work in my external USB-driven hard drive enclosure the other night... and I wasn't a happy camper.

I did the normal things, put it in the case, plugged it in, restarted Windows a couple times to try and pick it up, stuff like that. I had no luck getting it to show up in My Computer to start with, so I checked in the Adminitrative Tools (in Control Panel) launched the Computer Management MMC. In there, I checked the Disk Manager and found that the drive was there, but marked as Online, Unallocated.

According to everything I could find on the 'net (and believe me, I looked) all I had to do was right-click the drive, select 'Write Signature' and then I could format it and off I go. The problem with this was that when I did that, it would start doing something with the disk, then just sit there with its access light on, but not do anything - still couldn't access it, still couldn't format it.

To cut a long story short, I noticed that it was making a similar noise to what my old drive made when it woke up after being asleep for a while. All I had to do was unplug the drive (from the USB), then plug it in with Disk Manager open, constantly clicking 'Re-Scan Disks'. As soon as the new drive appeared on the listing, I did the right-click signature trick and it worked straight away. Then I kicked it into an immediate, complete format and everyone's happy!

Now all I need to do is clone my current drive onto this one, switch them over and I've got an upgraded drive and a spare external one :)

In case you didn't know, when you 'format' a computer's hard drive (or delete a file for that matter), it doesn't necessarily remove the data properly, it just marks those sectors as being available to write over in the future. If you don't actually write anything over them, then there is a distinct chance that someone can recover that data, using an excellent program such as R-STUDIO (which I bought a copy of, to recover data off my broken laptop, as described in this post).

So anyway, there are a number of ways that you can go about deleting something permanently, but I figured that the best approach was a physical one. I had an old drive that I was retiring (well, it retired itself on account of a hardware failure), so I decided that now was the chance to test my procedure, here's how it all went down;

1. Remove drive from host machine
2. Remove PCB board from the bottom of the drive (you can just lever it off with a screwdriver if you don't have the right type of screwdriver for the screws... you won't be needing it again :)
3. Place the drive so that the side where the PCB board was is *down*, and one end is supported on a small ledge (a doorstep works nicely)
4. Place pressure (i.e. stand) in the middle of the drive, angling your foot to ensure that the blade of your foot is applying the pressure to the drive
5. Continue standing/jumping on the drive until you hear a snapping sound, and then hopefully a pleasant little 'tinkle'
6. Review the situation: you should have broken the aluminium framing of the drive, which in turn allowed you to shatter the disk platters, which will now be on the ground and inside the drive.

You can now clean up the pieces of drive platter, and if you're really paranoid, dispose of them separately. Otherwise, throw them all in the bin and you can be pretty confident that your drive is very permanently erased.

NOTE: I take no responsibility whatsoever for the damage of your drives, their proceeding uselessness, or any potential recovery of the data that may or may not have been on the drive!

As Brendan Fraser says in The Mummy; "This keeps getting better and better", and as Homer says in The Simpsons; "in case you didn't notice, I was being sarcastic!"

This evening I was attempting to mount my laptop hard drive into my old desktop machine (a PII, 300) to see if I could get any data off it. When I plugged the machine in and tried booting it up - I heard 2 loud pops, followed by a small cloud of smoke, so I knew something was wrong :). I checked it out, and sure enough, my power supply was blown. You can see to the right (click for enlargement) and also in this picture that the middle of the power supply was covered with the remnants of one of the diodes (?transistors?) that exploded. Messy.

So now on to plan 2 - I'll take the drive to work tomorrow and see if I can get a chance to try mounting it on my machine at work instead, which I know is stable and operational at least, and which has network access to plenty of storage and a CD burner if I need it :)

More later.

Well things are actually looking good with the recovery of data from my failed hard drive!

I went ahead and downloaded a demo version of a program called "R-Studio", which is distributed by HDDRecovery in Australia. I had talked to the manager of HDDR and he suggested that I give it a go.

So here's roughly the process that ensued:

1. Plugged my 2.5" -> 3.5" adaptor into the drive
2. Put on a small jumper so that the drive was marked as the secondary device (to avoid conflicts with main drive on PC)
3. Went and located an odler-style IDE cable that would match up with the adaptor (panic here for a minute when I couldn't find one!)
4. Unplug my DVD drive at work and plug in the new drive, on it's special cable
5. Boot up my PC and it couldn't locate the drive at all, although BIOS appeared to have found it there
6. Load up R-Studio and get it to detect the drive, which it did successfully
7. Create an image file which contained the contents of the drive (12GB) and save to happy hard drive on my desktop

At this point I was pretty happy - in the process of creating the image, my files had been recompiled into a meaningful structure, and it appeared that most of my data was there. But wait, there's more;

1. Purchase the full copy of R-Studio!
2. Install and configure it on my desktop at work, then load up the image file
3. Go through and easily (although slowly) recover all the files that I wanted into a secured location on my happy hard drive
4. Copy those files, via our network to another machine that had a CD burner
5. On that machine, burn 5 CDs worth of recovered data (bunch of music, data, images, video etc!) and take home
6. Transfer required data back onto the new hard drive installed on my laptop!

So there you go - there's the basics of my drama, and how things have turned out. Personally, I think the $AUD 176.00 was a small price to pay - compared to the prospect of having the drive dismantled in a clean room environment, which would have cost thousands :). The fact that the drive was accessible through software saved my skin, and now I have all my photos, data files and music back and happy :) As it turns out, the only files that appear to have been irreparibly damaged are from within the C:\WINNT directory - and who's going to miss them? (except the boot sequence!)

I have been stupid enough to be running my machine over the last couple of years without keeping regular backups of my information. The other night, my hard drive failed, and it appears that I may have lost a lot of the information which I had on there, including some financial details, personal photos, volumes and volumes of personal documents and notes, plus a large amount of work which wasn't stored anywhere else except on my machine.

I am working on a Sony VAIO laptop as my main system at the moment, so I am now planning for the imminent purchase of a new desktop system, I think will be the deciding factor in me getting around to arranging it all. For those interested, I'm going to keep records on the entire process, starting...

Step 1: I flipped over my laptop and unscrewed all the screws I could see (later I realised that was a little excessive, but anyway...). I then turned it back the other way and lifted off the wrist-pad, where the touchpad lives. Under here, I located the hard drive, and carefully removed another screw (bottom-left corner when looking from above), and then removed the drive. I took off the mounting rails either side of the drive and transferred them onto the new drive which I purchase (exactly the same one - 20GB). From there, I put the drive back in, screwed the corner screw back in, replaced the wrist-pad and then screwed all the screws into the back again. I then put it back on it's docking station (with CD drive) and started it up with the Windows 2000 startup CD. Then off we go with installing everything from scratch.

Pleeeaassee... let me be able to read the drive which I have now removed from my laptop. I have arranged to get the adapter required so that I can mount the 2.5" laptop drive in a standard 3.5" desktop disk bay. That will then allow me to attempt to access the drive's contents from my old desktop computer (which I'll have to take out of mothballs for the occassion!). I'll post updates regarding my progress, but I hate to say that I am not holding my breath about getting anything off the drive, not after hearing the faint tinkle of what sounds like the drive head flopping around inside the drive...