Lately, my Powerbook has been very sluggish. Till now, I’d attributed its frequent SPsOD to my lack of hard drive space (sometimes under a gigabyte). But this morning when I plugged my Powerbook in and woke it up, it was way to slow and choppy to use. Restarting had helped before, so I did a manual reboot (Cmd-Ctrl-Powerkey) as I always do, sending it into a temporary state of self-unawareness as it starts back up again. Only this time, my little buddy didn’t reemerge from his coma.

Shock and horror. And my last backup was in April.

Well, I thought, DiskWarrior has saved me before, today shall be no different. And after downloading the required .01 update to DW on my cheapo Windows XP box (which I use only for testing websites … and playing with Googlycoolness), driving across town to Jennifer’s house and back to borrow her Powerbook so I could burn the updated DW to a bootable CD, I discovered a disturbing fact: DiskWarrior isn’t Magic.

It got half way done checking my disk directory, and stopped dead, leaving only the Spinning Pizza of Death to mourn with me.

Ugh. I searched the MacNN Forums. People with similar hard drive issues had used Data Rescue to recover files from their injured hardware. And they even had a trial version, so that you could test whether it was really going to solve your problem before you paid for the program. My faith in Mac software vendors reinforced, I downloaded Data Rescue (now accessing my drive via Target Disk Mode from Jennifer’s laptop, which was keeping mine company) and it did the exact same thing. Stopped dead, halfway through. And this time, I had to reboot her mac completely. And mine.

Since I’d bought a CompUSA service plan a few months ago, I called them up to see if they could help me. I told the tech what I’d tried. He assured me that I’d already thought of everything they knew to do, and recommended DriveSavers, the best recovery experts in the business. And they’d better be, considering the $500-$3100 quote DriveSavers subsequently gave me over the phone. Sure.

Back to my own inexpensive methods I went. I discovered (via some Google link) that I could see all my files when booted into Single User Mode, but I couldn’t do anything with them, since I didn’t know how to mount an external drive from the command line. I finally found this thread on MacOSXHints.com, where the guy describes how he mounted his trashed disk on another mac as a read-only volume. Bingo … that was exactly what I needed.

So I went to CompUSA in Greenville to buy a spare hard drive (to copy files to). I’ve successfully copied a few directories to the spare drive via Jennifer’s Mac, but when I get to a corrupted (or missing) file, both laptops crash simultaneously. Looks like I’ll be going through lots of trial-and-error tomorrow to get myself back up and running.

On the bright side, I always like starting with a fresh reinstall of OS X. And this time, I’ll still get to keep all my files while doing it. Another (sort-of) bright spot is that I’ll probably need to get a new internal hard drive for my Powerbook, since this one is making funny clicking sounds, which is probably what caused all this trouble in the first place. That’s not actually a bright spot, but if I replace the drive, I can get a bigger one, say, 100GB. Bigger is always good. Maybe the CompUSA service plan will pay to replace it.

To add insult to injury, David Pogue’s NYT column today was about his dead hard drive. Reviewed DriveSavers and everything. Not that I’d have taken action and backed up anyway, if I had read it yesterday, of course. I vaguely remember thinking a few days ago, I should really do another backup soon. Guess I ignored that voice one time too many.