After getting most of programs reinstalled, I wanted to copy my iPhoto library to the new drive my external back up disk. So, I jacked it in, and powered it up. And waited, and waited, and waited for it to show in Finder.
After 10 minutes, I figured something must have gone awry. It wasn’t obvious where to figure out what was going on at first, then the light bulb flashed and I tried disk utility. Unable to mount disk, please run verify operation.
Ok, lets give that a shot. Chug chug chug. Kaboom. Disk has problems, verification process ended. Please run repair operation. Well, fiddle dee dee. Lets give it a try.
Chug chug chug. Kaboom. File system on disk is damaged and can’t be fixed. Please copy whatever you can off the disk and reformat it.
Oh. crap.
At this point, I wonder if I just confused the disk utility program by trying to run verify and/or repair while it was already trying to do something else (I’d hope OSX would be smart enough to not let you do something like that, but who knows?) If the disk is toast, its not really gonna matter if I just yank it out now.
So, I did that, gave it a few seconds and jacked it back in. Chug, chug, chug. Blip, there’s the drive in Finder.
Phew.
All the irreplaceable files on the drive do exist in at least one other place, so if the drive did actually fail, I wouldn’t lose anything important, but I wouldn’t much look forward to trying copy a terabyte of stuff back on to a new drive from my other backups. That being said, its probably time to add another backup copy rotation into my back up system.
The 60Gb iPhoto library copy just finished. Hopefully everything made the trip as expected.
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