Diary of a Dying Machine

The Inconsistent Blog Entries
Many months since I posted to the public my thoughts. I have been updating a journal privately, however. The purpose of my posts is that if I have something to say for which someone else may benefit, then I want it to be public somehow. I do this also with my cable access programs. It doesn't matter to me if other people care, or even if 99% of the word's population doesn't know about my blog, the point is that I have something out there.

It's Below Zero Outside
Today is DVD Backup day. I take time out every few months to do a massive backup session to preserve all the hours of work toiling in my studio and edit suite. Today is particularly appropriate, because the high today may have reached zero, but the winds were in excess of 10 mph, making it officially JESUS GOD cold. I happened to have no obligations today, so I pumped up the thermostat and wore my jogging shorts. This day was also a good time to back things up, because the main hard drive of my G5 died on me. The first signs of it's demise occurred yesterday, when my OS X would appear to boot up OK, only to display a nice blue screen instead of my desktop. My second computer was hauled up from my studio to perform some triage. Using a firewire cable, I slaved the G5 to my studio G4 and saw my two internal hard drives. OK, so they were still alive. I began to look up on apple forums some treatment for the sick patient, and tried various 'safe' startup modes. I also got wise, and figured I should start backing up my G5 internal drive while it was still responding. I got about halfway through.

The Library is a Church
One thing my life depended on getting was my brand new media library. Since I religiously backup my work to data DVD every couple weeks, I have accumulated over 300 gigs of work (not including umpteen hours of digital video stored on tape). With this simple indexing system, the Media catalogue saved all the file information for all 300 or so backup discs I have in my library. I have gotten to the point that I have been sucking in so much raw media that I have to offload a ton of stuff to keep my precious hard drive space available for ongoing projects. Because of my computer programming background, more specifically my first job out of school at a data centre, I am pretty thorough in keeping my projects organised. So I was able to retrieve about half of my hard drive, saving me from reloading all 300 backup discs again.

Rampart, This is Squad 51
Next, were all my personal notes. About a month ago, I decided to backup some of my personal notes for the sake of having them available as I dreamed up my new website( Eyeball on the News - look for it in 2008!). I continued with my backups, but then I decided to try some other remedies. Maybe this backing up was unnecessary if i could just get my G5 to come up again. So I stopped the backup of my G5 hard drive and tried to use a disk repair utility (like an EKG). There was a notion that perhaps it was some login error, and could be eliminated. Easy enough. As I rebooted the ailing G5 this time, it powered itself down. Uh oh. I plugged the firewire from the G4 back to the G5, now my G5's startup drive did not appear. No more hard drive. I pulled it out of the machine, dusted it off, checked all the connections (think the scene in "2001" where Dave is pulling the memory out of HAL). Another reboot: Charging... Clear! - - - nothing. Couple more reboots. Damn You! Live!

R.I.P. Boot Drive
My Western Digital hard drive died on me at about 12:30 p.m. on 1/19/08. I still lost many hours of work. I also lost a few applications that I no longer have access to install disks. I had few options. Since I couldn't afford health care (apple care) for my G5, I would have to pay through the nose to take my baby to a clinic. The last resort I left for myself when the hard drive was still showing a pulse was to wipe it clean and start over. But now, I'm sure even if I transported it to any repair shop, they would call it DOA. There is a service out there can retrieve missing programs on my dead hard drive, but I could easily just buy the lost applications for a little more than they would charge. So open heart surgery was out.

Software Parenting is Expensive
After consulting a fellow G5 owner Vince, I concluded that I had to accept that my hard drive was gone, save the hospital bills, and rebuild the G5 on my own. It'll cost me about $600 to buy the lost programs. If I didn't do this, then over 200 hours of work on projects would be lost. Ironically, I just became a proud father of the full CS3 master collection, which took two tries to load on my G5 last week. Now I am getting slapped with another hefty fee to get my other software package. Karma works that way, and the ying of the yang of it will be that owning these programs will pay for themselves at some point in the future.

More to blog in the near future...