[drewprops]

Today I bought the backup application SuperDuper! and set it to copying my Powerbook's drive to an external drive and went merrily along my way. An hour or so later I went by the machine and noticed that the screen had gone to black and the beachball was up onscreen. I gave it a couple of wiggles and left it for awhile with no response.

I finally forced the book to shutdown and rebooted, except now it comes up with a grey screen... and if I disconnect that external drive and reboot it comes up with the classic blinking "can't find folder" icon.

Also, I have tried putting the machine into Target Mode and accessing from another machine with no luck.

My machine has been in verbose boot mode since they replaced the motherboard earlier this year and when I attempt to boot up from the Techtool disc that came with AppleCare it begins blasting out the boot up report and gets to a line that says "panic: We are hanging here" and stops doing anything.

Looking at the external drive from another machine I can see that the transfer is incomplete so it's of mild interest to me to recover the remainder of the files on this machine if at all possible....

I look forward to any help you guys can lend me here....


.

[PKIDelirium]

Happened during a backup operation? Sounds like your hard drive is mega-toasted.

[drewprops]

Update:
I've booted up with the Powerbook's original install DVD and am looking at the the Disk Utility right now.... guess what? I don't see my 'book's hard drive in the list. Only the installer DVD. And if I try to change the Startup disk the internal drive does not show up there either.

Guess I'm looking at removing the internal drive and running Disk Warrior (or whatever) on it, right?

Originally Posted by PKIDelirium Happened during a backup operation? Sounds like your hard drive is mega-toasted.

Yup.
Wondering if it's recoverable at all.....


.

[ghoti]

What does it say in the 2-3 lines before the "panic" line? It's rather obvious that there's a problem with the harddisk, but that would be a bit sudden. Has the disk shown any problems lately, or was the computer unresponsive for periods of 20-30 seconds at a time (mine did that when my harddisk died recently).

[iThink therefore iMac]

Maybe the red -head can help you out.



Oops....wrong thread.

[drewprops]

Originally Posted by ghoti What does it say in the 2-3 lines before the "panic" line? It's rather obvious that there's a problem with the harddisk, but that would be a bit sudden. Has the disk shown any problems lately, or was the computer unresponsive for periods of 20-30 seconds at a time (mine did that when my harddisk died recently).

Oh it's a screenload of the same thing, like it's banging its head against a wall.
The thing that stands out in that cycle are several "Kernel loadable modules in backtrace"...

com.apple.driver.AppleKeyLargo(1.3.2d6)
com.apple.driver.AppleMacRISC2PE
com.apple.driver.iokit.IOPCIFamily


it finally dies with:

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.3:
Wed Jan 8 19:14:49 PST 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.16.8.obj~5/RELEASE_PPC


panic: We are hanging here...

[drewprops]

It looks like Monday will be the day I go to drop this machine off at my repair center to let them attempt to grab as much data off the drive as possible, and perhaps install a new drive in the machine.

Oy vey.

[turtle]

What kind of data is left on the external you were backing up to? Did I miss that in your posts? Some of that data should be good.

Edit: Never mind, I see you are missing more than enough of your data. Data recovery might work for you, I'd certainly minimize the messing with the drive you do now though, all it will do is make it worse. Sorry for your loss.

[drewprops]

Certainly not a ringing endorsement for SuperDuper! .....

[PKIDelirium]

It likely wasn't SuperDuper! The drive was probably already starting to fail, and the stress of a total clone/backup pushed it over the edge.

[chucker]

It certainly wasn't SuperDuper!. This kind of issue is on the hardware side; a mere user-mode application couldn't possibly cause it (just trigger it, as happened here).

[turtle]

Yeah, not to take on the broken record, but "what they said." ^^

[drewprops]

The worst part is that the LAST time it was in the local shop (earlier this year) to have its motherboard replaced I asked them to pop a new drive in the machine and the tech forgot my request and I blew it off with the notion that I'd replace it later...

...and if there was any question about me using SuperDuper! again, I paid for the blasted thing and fully intend to use the darned thing!! I simply meant that I'll naturally be a bit gunshy the next time I try it!!

[PKIDelirium]

It shouldn't be a problem if the drive is in good shape. To be safe, I always check the SMART status before running a full backup.

[drewprops]

IIRC, the SMART status only applies to the boot drive... is that correct? Doing a quick run through of five drives attached to this machine, only one, the boot volume, shows "Verified" for the SMART status....

[PKIDelirium]

USB/FireWire enclosures don't support SMART status.

[drewprops]

Oh yeah...
Even though a hard drive failure is to be expected by the owner of every computer on the planet, this particular failure reminded me of the problems I've been experiencing with this machine so I took the time today to call Apple for a chat about my machine. This Powerbook is only 3 years old and the motherboard has been replaced twice and now the hard drive failure was no picnic. They weren't about to fling me a brand new laptop, which is fine because I like this machine and as a stockholder I feel that the company shouldn't be handing out replacement equipment like candy to whining customers... but I was really irritated that there was no way for me to extend AppleCare or get a refurb of a different Powerbook that might be less prone to the motherboard problem.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by PKIDelirium USB/FireWire enclosures don't support SMART status.

More specifically, SMART gets lost in bridging. Using USB or FireWire as the native interface for a hard drive never took off – they're internally either PATA/IDE or SATA (or, rarely, SCSI). So, unless you use no bridging at all (such as using an internal connection via PATA, SATA or SCSI, or an external one via SCSI or eSATA), you lose SMART in the process.

At least until some manufacturer comes around and extends the USB and/or FireWire spec accordingly to route such information through, that is.

[drewprops]

Just an update: the data on the drive couldn't be retrieved through normal methods. The shop let me keep the old drive and sent in a core to cover the one that would've come out of my 'book. I don't have the $$$ to recover this drive right now but I'm going to hang onto it for awhile, just in case.

I had a prior backup of some of the data on the volume that SuperDuper! was going to use as the backup disk... so I'm going to buy Data Recue II and see what's on there that I can grab.


.

[turtle]

Sucks about the drive Drew. I still have one of my drives in a safe deposit box waiting until I can afford the data recovery on it.