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

[time3.livejournal.com]

Good luck with getting your library back on-line. This has always been one of the reasons I keep my library on a RAID array. I currently hold our 65G library of music on Solaris 10 in ZFS (RAID-Z) across 4 33.6G UW 10k SCSI disks on the Enterprise 250. I have it backed up on a single 80G EIDE disk in case.

Leopard, I've read, comes with ZFS, so you are able to do nice arrays now in OS X.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

I do have a D1000 I could stripe. I may have to consider that. ZFS is a fantastic idea. I'm still waiting to be able to create a bootable ZFS partition. There were rumors of that coming to the 08/07 release of Solaris, but as you know, that never materialized. I'm not what anyone considers an early adopter and will likely fully embrace ZFS once its got a little more maturity under its belt. That's the nice thing about running it at work though - I'll know when that time has come.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[drax0r.livejournal.com]

Leopard, I've read, comes with ZFS

Apple pulled developers off OS X to try to get iPhone out the door.

As a result, not only was Leopard late, it also shipped without some features that were promised. The ones that stick out most are read-write ZFS and NAS-capable Time Machine.

For the moment, OS X only supports read-only mounting of ZFS volumes.

On the other hand, iTunes supports NFS mounted libraries, so E could do like you and use a Solaris controlled ZFS volume across the wire.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

You, Sir, are a fountain of knowledge. I wished I knew half the stuff that you do.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

That's a bitch to do, BTW. Not easy.

[schpydurx.livejournal.com]

I thought you were a highly paid Solaris SysAdmin. Quit your whining, recruit!

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

Its a bitch to do on the OSX side. (http://ehowton.livejournal.com/108357.html)

[time3.livejournal.com]

For the moment, OS X only supports read-only mounting of ZFS volumes.

Ah, I didn't know the limitation. Thank you for the info.

Knowledge

[snapper521.livejournal.com]

For one of the first times in my life; I whole heartedly agree with something which Tomas has said.

I wish I knew half of the knowledge which you are in possession of Sir. I am constantly amazed at the things which come out of the brains of both you and Eric. Merely commenting back and forth increases my knowledge... which isn't hard to do since I have almost none when it comes to computers.

Tomas: I am being modest. Do not flip on me about how I am not as computer illiterate as I act. :-P