Black Friday

[ehowton]

Bit of a scare yesterday morning. For reasons I can't entirely articulate, I chose to unmount my iTunes volume from the PowerMac G4 and power down the box last night. This morning, the iTunes volume didn't do anything but 'click' on power up. My entire collection of music. ~18,000 songs, 67GB. Most of it is backed up.

On CDROM.

Offsite.

External drive clicking can be attributed to something other than hard drive failure, and that's low power. Though this is a 7200 rpm 8MB/cache full-size drive (read, requires power to run) its still in an external enclosure, so I removed it from its case and put in inside the G4.

That worked!

But getting anything across the G4's low-speed USB 1.0 port is painfully tedious. Still, something has to be done. I loaded up the kids and trekked out on Black Friday to brave the crowds around noon. Oddly enough, there weren't any. And there were no lines at the checkout. And I found a 500GB external USB drive for $87.

Backing up teh max0r in preparation for upgrading to Leopard was a non-issue. The high-speed USB 2.0 port on the mini is just that: High-speed. The idea is once I backup/restore everything, this new .5TB drive can become my Time Machine. drax0r recently implemented an identical strategy. So with everything backed up on the mini, I turn to the G4 and copy the contents from the now internal 160GB drive to a folder on the new drive. 30 hours to transfer. Good grief.

Leopard is fast and beautiful and I love the new dock and everything about it. I'm very excited. Until I install the 10.5.1 upgrade, which craters my box.

So I reinstall, and everything works great. drax0r suggests reinstalling the update, which craters my box.

So I reinstall, and nothing works.

At all.

Further attempts to reinstall are blocked by copies of archiving my data to the point my boot drive fills up. Thank goodness for Terminal and the rm -Rf command.

Re-re-re-re-re-reinstalling again now.

Comments

[galinda822.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to get my Leopard! Of course, I'll have Christopher help me install it.
BTW...I think he's going full-time with Apple in January - as a trainer!

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Yours will handle Leopard admirably. Mine is a first-gen overclocked G4 which barely made the cut as far as minimum CPU speed. My next Mac will be the one you & schpydurx have. And congrats to Christopher! That freaking rox0rs.

[galinda822.livejournal.com]

He's so pysched about it! It's his dream job! He's been pushing Apple products to all of us for years now. Andruid is his current target! :)

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

galinda822 does not like to be compared to me despite my redeeming qualities. Please refrain from committing this infraction ever again.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Excellent avatar, sir!

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you, Sir!

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

Speaking of avatars, why did you use the Safari avatar instead of teh max0r avatar?

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Elementary, my dear boy. I've recently used my mini avatar, and have yet to author a post with this one.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

But Safari was not your subject.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Neither was a mac mini, but since I don't have an iTunes avatar, and had previously used my mini avatar, I thought something relating to Apple and Apple products would be easily understood.

Apparently I was mistaken.

I struggle every time I author a post wondering aloud if I should write to the "lowest common denominator" or aim for my own expectations.

You lose out every single time.

Sorry.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

You could have also used a Leopard (X with purple background) avatar or been smart like me and have a catch all.

You lose out every single time.
Go fuck yourself.