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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

Sink-o-de Mayo
By Roger Nichols

My last week has been hell. I was ready to start mixing a new project on May 5th. The client came over with a hot-swap tray fitted with a 72gig SCSI drive filled with the Pro Tools files and sessions. I slipped the drive into the chassis, turned the key, and mounted the drive on my Mac’s desktop. I then double-clicked on the hard disk icon to open the drive and start transferring the files over to one of my drives. That’s when it started.

As if I was in one of the slow motion scenes from The Matrix I watched all five of my disk icons change to folder icons, and then all of the icons on my screen disappeared. The finder had quit and the computer was dead. When I re-booted the computer said, “Rebuilding desktop folder.” I knew I was in big trouble. After the computer finished booting, none of the hard disks mounted on the desktop. I located my ATTO folder and tried to mount the volumes. The physical drives showed up in ATTO, but I could not get them to show up on the desktop. “Uh-oh” was the mildest of my utterances. The client looked on with apprehension, contemplating the condition of his files. The computer froze up. I threw the mouse against the target I have painted on one wall. I went to the drawer where I keep spare mouses. The drawer was getting empty. I must remember to re-stock.

This event was the start of a very long week. Today is the seventh day, and I am not all the way back to normal yet. Maybe writing this column would get my mind off the tragedy. Wait, I’m writing about the tragedy. But I have a Chinese lady who comes on Fridays to do my irony.

I decided it would not be good to try to boot from the system disk again, as there were important files on that drive that I had not yet backed up. This stuff only happens to other people, and I laugh when they tell me their stories. I pulled out the 60gig IBM DeskStar system drive and replaced it with a spare 72gig IBM DeskStar that I had readied for such an occasion. I keep the spare drives right near the spare mouses. I figured that if I were prepared, it would never happen. The spare drive already had a system 9.2.2 on it (I can’t upgrade to System X until Pro Tools upgrades to System X.) I installed the new system drive and configured the old boot drive as the slave. I booted the computer and the lunchmeat old system drive would not even mount.

Time for Norton Utilities! I have been a Norton user since 1984. I still use Norton Commander on my PCs. Anyway; Norton attempted to recover my system disk. After a couple of hours searching, Norton reported, “49,631 files found. Would you like me to rebuild the directory?” I clicked YES and Norton churned for five minutes and then… “Error while rebuilding directory. You now have Zero files.” After four more attempts with the same results, I headed to my friendly Apple Store. They recommended Disk Warrior, so I bought three copies and ran back to my studio. Disk Warrior churned and churned for two hours and then said, “A preview of what Disk Warrior recovered is mounted on your desktop. Open it to check your files and then click OK to rebuild your disk directory.” I open up the preview folder and-and-and IT WAS EMPTY! I threw the other two copies of Disk Warrior against the wall. The pile under the target zone was starting to shape up pretty well.

I decided to take a break and check my e-mail. My Netscape browser home page is www.versiontracker.com where I keep up on all of the latest software updates. Right there on the top line was Data Rescue 3.0 by Prosoft Engineering. “We focus on recovery of data, not hard disk repair.” What can I loose? Went to the web site and bought a copy. I loaded it on the broken computer and ran it on the dead 60gig drive. The program said “Scanning disk. This will take approximately 487 minutes and 12 seconds.” What? That is eight hours! Well, it took a total of 16 hours to scan for files, build allocation block maps and present a list of recovered files. It recovered 43,000 of the files. I spent the next couple of hours copying files off to another disk. Data Rescue saved my ass this time.

Back-up

You see, I always back-up my data. I back-up to CD-R, DVD-R, DLT, AIT-II, Exabyte, and 180gig fire wire drives. This time I was moving files from a SCSI drive to my system drive and then I was going to burn DVD-ROMs of the audio files. When I mounted the client’s drive, both the original and back-up copies were connected to the computer at the same time. It erased both drives. The files and the back-up got clobbered at the same time. Luckily Data Rescue recovered the data and I burned the DVD-R before anything else could happen.
Not only were files erased, but also key disk installs of Pro Tools plug-ins. I could not recover all of the installs from the crashed disk. I had to use my back-up install floppies to get those plug-ins working again. I ran into “This is not the exact key disk used to install this program, so you will not be able to recover your install.” I can get a foreign visa for flight instruction easier than I can get plug-in authorizations.
The other thing is that I had to replace my hard disk. All of my challenge-response authorizations were gone also. Waves used to use a dongle, which made this sort of crash a non-event. Now Waves uses challenge-response and I have to go through that mess.
Here is what I want. I have said this before, but I guess the right people do not read my column. I want Pace to make a utility to read your hard disk and list all of the programs you have installed with key disks, and then transfer the authorizations to iLok. Next, I want Pace to recognize USB memory disk for challenge-response authorizations. Then you can have all of your keys on a USB gadget that you can take with you and not worry about buying a new computer. Mac introduces a new computer every six months. I usually skip a cycle and end up upgrading once per year or 18 months. This means I have to keep recovering my key disk authorizations, put them on the new computer, and then deal with new challenge response authorizations every year or so.

Uh-oh, I just heard my computer say “It’s not my fault. Pro Tools has unexpectedly quit because of a type 2 error. Please save your data and re-boot your computer.” What? How can I save my data, you just said that Pro Tools has unexpectedly quit? CRASH! BANG!

I may be getting that new Mac earlier than I planned. I also have to re-paint the target on my wall to fix these scratches. The heap is looking really good now!