06/12/04
61I shouldn't be allowed near computers
I’ve not had a good time with hardware recently. In the last 2 months, the following has happened:
G4 Powerbook – Tried to defrag using TechTool (yes 10.3 does still need defragging, as it only defrags files under 20mb), managed to corrupt the hard drive, and lost 8 months of digital photos. Now I know I was an arse to try this without backing up first. My freelance work is backed up religiously every night, its just the personal stuff I was slack about.
Tried to re-install the OS using my 10.1 disk and upgrade disks for 10.2 and 10.3. The 10.1 disk no longer worked, so I had to buy a new copy of 10.3 to get the OS re-installed.
G5 – Graphics card died (one whole week after the warranty ran out), no OEM parts available for a few months, so got a third party card which was outputting a signal too powerful for my monitor that it made it switch into standby. A driver upgrade was eventually found, and all was, finally, well.
G4 Powerbook – again. Stopped charging, needed new internal DC connector.
Backup Drive – dropped from a height of 12 inches, and promptly stopped working. Bought a 200gb Firewire 800 drive for less than half the 20gb drive cost me over 2 years ago. Sheesh.
iPod – no longer mounts. Still haven’t solved that one, any ideas gratefully received. It still charges and shows up in system profiler’s list of firewire devices, but no show.
Netgear ADSL Modem – Dies, taking my internet connection with it. No more broadband for me, I’m currently on a restricted dial up connection, and boy do I feel withdrawal symptoms. However, this at least has a good story, as the Netgear comes with a 3 year guarantee, and a replacement is already in the post! When I rang Technical Support, I was straight through to an informed, friendly chap who was enormously helpful. No switchboard – nice one Netgear, I’m very impressed!
| Engineers time to attempt to recover data | £90 |
| OS X 10.3 | £100 |
| Loss of family photos and movies | priceless |
| New ATI Radeon Graphics Cardcard | £280 |
| Engineers time to diagnose problem and fit new card | £90 |
| New OEM DC Conenctor and engineers time to fit | £115 |
| New Firewire drive | £120 |
| Total cost | *£795* |
The only hardware left not to fail is the printer and the scanner. I’m waiting.
The moral of story is, don’t go freelance. Let your company pay for it. Oh, and also, you can’t make too many backups…
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Hans said 1405 days ago:
Oh my. Poor you. Usually I something computer-related fails everyday in my house, and most of the time it’s either the wireless network (75%) or one of the printers (25%).I’d be willing to bet a hefty amount of dough that the printer will fail first. :)
Virginia said 1405 days ago:
Same thing happened with my G5 monitor card… I was still under warranty, thankfully, but since it had already happened to ANOTHER G5 of mine, leading to it being declared DOA and replaced, I reckon there’s scope for you having a noisy whinge about it. It’s totally unreasonable to pay a premium for buying Apple’s first-run, slightly-bodgy machines, and then not be supported when manufacturing problems wreck your life.I’ll shut up now…
Gabriel said 1405 days ago:
<troll>If you had PeeCees, you could have bought 12 with the money for the G5 and G4 powerbook, and used 10 of them for backup :)</troll>Alexander Micek said 1405 days ago:
Goodness, that’s one heck of a list of failures. I bet Apple “heavy duty” computers, (with components tested for longer wear hours, and higher manufacturing tolerances) would sell well amongst the many people who rely on Apples for their primary income. Impractical as that idea is.As for the IPod problem, I have found the forums at iPodLounge.com to be quite helpful, best of luck in finding a solution and avoiding further problems in the future.
Karen said 1405 days ago:
I also had my G5’s video card fail. I’ve had numerous machines (mainly PCs) in the past, and never, ever had a video card fail.However, the Radeon 9600 started to fail on boot up, requiring numerous attempts to get a video signal. On waking from sleep I’d get a screen of multi-coloured flashing blocks briefly appearing before the display was lost.
I think that there must have been a bad batch of video cards in early G5 machines. My machine was still in warranty, but I couldn’t do without it at the time and ended up just buying a Radeon 9800.
Jordan Cole said 1405 days ago:
Yeesh… the only exposure I’ve had to an actual Mac is using OS9 (I believe) at a museum somewhere for about five minutes. I have, however, been using PCs for nigh unto 10 years, and I’ve not had a failure yet. I believe I’m quite fortunate, as all other “Windoze” users seem to be getting repairs at least once a year. Either way, best of luck on not having anything else fail.Chris McElligott said 1405 days ago:
Wow thats really makes me appreciate how much luck I’ve had with my Macs. I’ve has my G4 iMac for 2 years and it’s been perfect but now I have a feeling that I’ve mentioned that it will explode on me now.And previous to that my little G3 iMac was perfect for 3 years, so John… sucks to be you. :)
Scott Frazer said 1405 days ago:
I have built all of my computers and haven’t had many problems, except for the one time I short circuited out my sound card, totally my fault. I find that building a computer gives you more control over how it works, but it could just be that I’ve been lucky with hardware too.Tim said 1405 days ago:
You may want to back up your pictures (and music?) on to data DVDs. I just spent the whole weekend doing so—15 DVDs worth of data. I have my whole system backed up on a 500 gig drive which is almost full now. I use You Sync to keep the backup current. But I have so much music I purchased online and personal photos (that are priceless to me) that I was afraid to lose them.Sorry. I would be SOOOO upset if this happened to me.
Zara said 1405 days ago:
I feel your pain in many ways. I recently had my powerbook stolen out of my bag at a restaurant as I was enjoying a meal. Of course, I hadn’t backed up my work – only my music and applications (all the things that are easily replacable), but the biggest loss was the time and energy that was put into the work, and of course all the time it takes to perfectly customize your OS! I am now a preacher of backing up on a regular basis. The same week my iPod died for a second time – I had already had it replaced once for a faulty hard drive, this time the warranty was expired one week! Good luckJeremy said 1405 days ago:
You are Jon Hicks! Demand a brand spankin’ new powerbook with each project…kidding of course. I dropped my old powerbook once and inflicted extensive damage (broke a monitor hinge, the hard drive, much more). I called Apple, said it was defective and they fixed it free of charge! Seriously. Maybe ask Dunstan ?Yoel Roth said 1405 days ago:
That’s a fairly stunning list ofdisastersaccomplishments, but I might just have an answer to the iPod crisis.. every once in a while, the iPod firmware decides that it doesn’t need to mount anything, but the system will still identify the device, so try reset the iPod itself. Hold down both “PLAY/PAUSE” and “MENU” for a few seconds, and it’ll restart, and hopefully mount successfully.No, that won’t delete any of your songs.
Emily said 1405 days ago:
I had an iPod problem a while back where it refused to mount. Accidentally found out how to fix it and thought I might pass it on.If it shows up in Disk Utility, try reparing it from there. I’d started Disk Utility to do something else and was very surprised to see my non-mounting iPod in the list of disks.
Aaron Schaefer said 1405 days ago:
I’m a firm believer that data doesn’t exist unless it’s in three places at once. Losing personal data is no fun…Judi Sohn said 1405 days ago:
Jon, if the graphics card that died was a Radeon 9600 inside of a rev. 1 G5, then it’s a known problem with those cards. I got bit by it too, luckily within warranty. Here’s a thread on the Apple discussion forums. What’s interesting is that there was a technote about the problem while all G5s were under warranty, but now it’s gone I only knew the link because I blogged about the problem when it happened to me.Jeff Croft said 1405 days ago:
Jon-No offense, but please stay away from my site. I don’t want you F-ing up my stuff, too. :)
Jeff
Steve said 1405 days ago:
Four Macs – three current models – and one external firewire drive. No problems mounting, not one second of downtime, no programs crashing, no update issues. Nothing.Sorry Jon.
neil said 1405 days ago:
I have to concur; that’s an incredibly unsusual string of bad luck with Apple equipment! I feel your pain – freelancing and suddenly finding out that you have to spend a thousand bucks to recover from some disastrous equipment failures is nasty.I have to note, though: the only time you ever have to defrag a HFS+ Mac OS X disk is if you’re doing heavy video work. Seriously – defragging any other time doesn’t help performance, and just sets you up for disaster (as you noticed).
The reset iPod suggestion is a good one – that should set it straight. If not, the “baby with the bath water” solution is to reinstall the software on the iPod.
As far as backups go, I highly recommend integrating a backup system where you take a copy of your backups off-site at least once a month. I had an office fire a few years ago and lost everything. It would have been a blow that ended my freelancing career if I hadn’t had the foresight to keep off-site backups. I can’t recommend that enough.
54 said 1405 days ago:
;uiopErik J. Barzeski said 1405 days ago:
If your computer dies a week out of warranty, take it to an Apple store. You’d have to find the biggest jerk in the world to have him not honor your warranty.It’s standard policy to be a little lenient to people who are only a week or two out of warranty.
And on portables, I always recommend AppleCare. It just makes sense. The cheapest repair on a portable is upwards of $400 or more.
Hunter Chorey said 1405 days ago:
Regarding the non-mounting iPod – have you checked to see if your firewire card has gone bad? I’ve have a card or that had a short in them, and that has caused the iPod not to mount until i got a new firewire card for my desktop. Something to think about, at least :)Kris Khaira said 1405 days ago:
I’m freelancin too, and my work depends on my new Powerbook. But you just spooked me out.I’m going to backup my data now.
Mearso said 1405 days ago:
I consider myself something of an expert at breaking ipods having done 4 in the last year!As a previous poster has said resetting is the first thing to try.
what Generation is it? the 1st gens sometimes had this problem
The last one that I killed was strange. I plugged it in to my powerbook, the screen on the ipod went black and has been blank ever since.
I think that one is down to a faulty firewire port on the TiBook.
more about that
Use your power wisely Mr Hicks!
Paul Airy said 1405 days ago:
Backups seem to be the last priority when you’re ‘on your own’, especially as auto-backup software like retrospect has been a constant source of frustration for me. This year I’ve started to do a weekly backup manually, and found this has already ‘saved the day’ a number of times.Gustaf said 1404 days ago:
As for the iPod I would agree with the suggestion that resetting it should be the first step. If that fails you could always try to reformat it (provided you have all you music and data stored elsewhere obviously). There could be a bonus to this. When I switched from FAT32 to HFS I noticed that the battery life seemed to be restored to what it was when the iPod was new. Don’t ask me why…John Oxton said 1404 days ago:
How much!!! You could have got yourself three brand spanking new PC’s for that! ;-)John Oxton said 1404 days ago:
Oops! Someone already said that, sorry! :-(Vincent Grouls said 1404 days ago:
Wow, blogs being terrorised by Apple it seems… Michael @ Binary Bonsai also had some probs with his Powerbook & iPod.I’ve been using Macs for 4 years, and only once lost all data, in the first year I had my iBook G3. Only cost me €25 to get everything restored – whew.
Lately I had some problems where my eMac kept crashing, but a good re-install seems to have solved that. I must admit that my endless fiddling might have been the reason for that *blush*.
Note to self: don’t ever start a blog – Apple doesn’t like that!
Tim said 1404 days ago:
Oh, thank you for the reminder – it’s time to do backups. I try to run all updates, virus scan, backups, whatnots at the beginning of the month – but I haven’t made a back up of my digital photos yet. On the to-do list for tonight.As for the “could have bought 10 PC…” , sure he could, but then he’d be using a PC. : ) If only I could afford to move to Mac…
Dysfunksional.Monkey said 1404 days ago:
I once had my Tiny PC’s PSU go about a month after the warrenty expired. Replaced that, and found that it took out my motherboard too. Replaced that. And the CPU, just to be on the safe side. Still no joy. RAM had gone. Replaced that. Graphics card needed to be replaced too. Finally got it up and running, and quickly backed-up everything. Things went well for another month, before my HD started clunking and failed.So I replaced it. With a Dell.
Jeremy said 1404 days ago:
I recently started working at a new job – discovered that the only backup mechanism for this design / print house was entirely manual (to DVD-RAM, not the most stable, or even cost-effective media). I promptly informed management that without some sort of redundancy and automated backup mechanism, put together a proposal for a RAID (scalable, redundant data storage) and tape backup mechanism. Proposal sat on boss’ desk for two weeks, but they were spurred to action when in the course of three days we lost drives one two desktop machines and the file server. On the desktop side, we were fortunate enough to only lose some email and user settings; the file server drive was a different story – 80GB of original artwork that existed no where else – USD3000 later, the 99% of the data has been recovered, but still…As for “you could buy X number of PCs for that price…” – ignores the question of whether Jon could be more productive on a PC. Personally, I hav both, and with few exceptions I get more done on my 500 MHz slot-loading iMac than I do on a much newer Win2K box. (And I can’t get anything done in the abomination that is XP…). And Apple has its share of issues – but I can tell you all sorts of stories about hardware probelms on any number of PCs (name brands like Dell, Toshiba, HP, Compaq); it’s just than Jon had a run of bad luck. My condolences, Jon.
jaffry said 1404 days ago:
i’ve had various hardware (apples and lemons) die on me at various times for as long as I can remember (especially when there’s a deadline lurking nearby). Nothing like that rush of blood to the head when there’s a hardware disaster so near a deadline but i digress…i have this almost 7 year old Dell Pentium machine that serves as a Linux sandbox/server and it hasn’t failed on me (hardware or software wise) even once.
maybe it’s just that they don’t make hardware like they used to…
Todd Dominey said 1404 days ago:
IMO, I would stay away from TechTool (and Norton Utilities for that matter). I defragged an external firewire hard drive a couple of years ago with TechTool and it completely hosed the drive. Norton Utilities couldn’t get it back either. I ended up borrowing a copy of DiskWarrior from a friend, and it was able to piece together about 3/4 of my old content. The rest was corrupt.Since then I bought my own copy of DiskWarrior and never—ever—use anything else. I have it on hand mainly for emergencies, but I run it every couple of months (even on my iPod) to help keep things in order.
Jeff Harrell said 1404 days ago:
yes 10.3 does still need defraggingUm. No, it doesn’t. All files bigger than 20 MB are automatically defragmented on the fly. And files smaller than 20 MB don’t need it.
The only thing defragmenting your hard drive accomplishes is to load the pistol and spin the chamber for you. If you like playing Russian Roulette with your data, by all means, defragment away.
Jon Hicks said 1404 days ago:
“Um. No, it doesn’t. All files bigger than 20 MB are automatically defragmented on the fly. And files smaller than 20 MB don’t need it.” – Jeff, no, it only defrags files under 20mb. If you deal with a lot of high res images, photoshop file, or video, you do need to defrag.I’d also like to say that I’ve years of trouble free mac use. As Jeremy said “It’s just a run of bad luck”.
Regarding the iPod, I have so far tried:
* resetting the iPod
* using different firewire ports
* shutting down the mac, unplugging to reset firewire ports
* Ditching iPod and iTunes preferences, re-installing iTunes
All without any luck :o(
Jan Korbel said 1404 days ago:
Oh my, oh my… I know it won’t help you, but I just have to tell you this story of mine (delete it if you wish – no problem): It all started with rastling HDD which then accasionally refused to boot, so I get new one transfered data and everything was fine – for one week.After one week, it was in the summer, and it was really hot in the office and we have opened window, but it had to be fixed with bowling balls so it did not open too much which produced draught (I am not sure abou this word – it should meant the realy strong blow of wind in the room).
And what just have to happen: the wind blown so much that the balls slipped and fell to the socket and unplugged my computer. We laughed all untlill I found that the PC does not want to start even with the power on. After pulling out parts and trying all sort of voodoo tricks we were sure that the motherboard AND processor are dead. So I went buy new motherboard and processor and new memory – the old 750 MB was not compatible with new motherboard. And everything work fine again in the morning.
Then I went off to lunch and upon return I realized that the computer is off again. Little bit of searching and I found that the processor’s fan stopped working. OK, OK… just jump to local store get new fan and we are running again. Untlil next day…
Again I came back from lunch and computer off again… Tryied to start it… nope.. again… nothing… The computer power source this time. So within 2 weeks I upgraded most of the computer.
I am waiting for the graphic card for giving up soon :)
Hans Taktmann said 1404 days ago:
My full empathy—but: the guy who is suggesting that one week after the deadline warranty isnt all that dead already is very right.And: you shouldn’t have bought a new copy of 10.3!! my god, dont overperform this “I’m in full compliance”-approach; any second reader of your very fine blog would have sent you some copies of his 10.3-cd’s, really. come on, save some bugs for the fun-stuff (i.e. a 5gig-mini-iPof or something) ...!
And, sorry, 8 months of photos gone for good just because one harddrive dies … but you mentioned the golden rule of backupping already—
Josh Jarmin said 1404 days ago:
Its always funny, while reading these Mac problem posts, to see how PC people somehow think that Macs are perfect. They must believe Apple tells people that macs will live forever without a single problem. Hardware is still hardware. Software is still software. In the end, if pushed hard enough (or just randomly), stuff breaks.Stephane said 1404 days ago:
You have a curse too ?Mine started the first day I worked on a Mac, got the poor thing to restart and lost the server connection by working in Word. It got worse when I bought my second computer, an Mac II VX ! In case you don’t know about the II VX, it was the shortest live Mac in history, it was so screwed, the processor was running at almost half the speed it was suppose to :-(
Then it was my PowerComputing PowerWave that stop working with a Linux Install. My iMac DV that got a screwed up hard disk, my palm that had a defective processor, countless printer that stop working 1 month after the warranty (I bought 3 printer in 4 years !!). CD-burner that simply stop closing, had to close the tray manually, etc.
I usually have to re-install OS X every 6 to 9 month with a clean install because of weird bug. Just got my new iMac and I’m already having trouble with the Airport. A couple of minutes ago I simply lost my network for no apparent reason, I had to de-select and re-select “use Interference Robustness” to see my network again, actually I still don’t know much about Airport, might be my fault.
feaverish said 1404 days ago:
My 12” PowerBook crashed last week and stopped booting up. I was able to get all the data off the drive by booting up into FireWire Target Disk Mode and transferring the disk to a G5 here at work, and everything works fine after a complete erase and install.Still, it’s the first real crash I’ve ever experienced on any Apple computer since my old IIc.
Roger Herbert said 1404 days ago:
I feel your pain, though the worst feeling is when the dataloss is self inflicted. A year or so back, I was performing a complete wipe-and-reinstall of my PC. It has two physical harddisks installed – one for the OS and apps, one for data storage. Guess which one I told it to format… The worst part was the nanosecond after hitting return to start the format and realising the mistake. Three months’ email and photos lost. Nothing life-threatening, but still…Also, £280 for a video card? That must be some heavy duty gear – my Radeon 9800pro weighed in at around £150 last year and has been more than capable of any 2D design (or 3D gaming) in my PC (and routinely embarrasses my iMac G5’s nVidia).
Mark said 1404 days ago:
I have to agree apple care is the way to go! Just extended my pbooks coverage 2 more years. I can’t afford 1k if my screen dies or something. Sorry to hear about your luck jon but here is a beacon of hope. Usually following such disaster comes a spurt fo creative energey so magnificent you are bound to wow and amaze yourself and us to a level never before thought of. Think of it as a “Test” before you really score. Best wishes on your recovery and very sorry about the photos. been there.Massimo said 1404 days ago:
Oh, then the two of us should definitely not meet! We would cause a major malfunction in the primary software of the World Bank or something like that…Jeremy said 1404 days ago:
Jon – here’s a tip (a little late, I know); instead of a defrag utility, use a backup app like Retrospect to do a complete image of your data to an external drive, format the source drive, and restore. Two things come of this: 1) the restore process writes the files sequentially – net result is a degfragmented system and 2) you get a bonus complete backup. Depending on the speed of the drives, this is also frequently faster than running a defrag as well.Jaffry – no, they don’t make hardware the way they used to, thanks to the commoditization of computer hardware. I’ll bet that 7 year-old Dell cost a pretty penny back in the day…
Jeremy Smith said 1404 days ago:
Wow, that makes me feel better. In the past 3 months I’ve had a lightning strike to my desktop, then a harddrive failure in my laptop (lost tons of data, including 6 months of pictures and 1-2 weeks worth of work). The wireless NIC I just stuck in my new Dell hates me and my laptop decides the harddrive crash wasn’t enough and now overheats and shuts down at random. I’ve finally learned my lesson, though: backup daily and never throw out that old Pentium 200mhz with Win98—it will save your butt someday.My wife told me the other day that if this keeps up, maybe I should just stop freelancing—it just costs me too much in new hardware. :)
Alex Reid said 1404 days ago:
Ack, so many people with problems! Unfortunately, ‘tis a fact of life that hardware, from Macs through dishwashers to PCs, sometimes fails. My trusty li’l iMac G3 has yet to have any problems, apart from the time I tried booting up into Mac OS 9 and the hard-disc refused to mount, no matter what I did (I hate the system-folder-with-blinking-question-mark icon with a passion). I’ve since uninstalled OS 9 and now live a happy X only life.dille said 1404 days ago:
My list of problems:* My Mac IIfx had a power problem once—wouldn’t boot, not even a little bit. My day fixed that (1 cheap part and a soldering iron). That same IIfx had, long before that, consumed a 500 MB Digital harddisc (which had always made funny, loud noises). It also blew a 3.5” drive SCSI cabinet.
Way before that, I once used TimesTwo to double the 170MB harddisk the IIfx was shipped with, which went OK for a while. Then my luck ran out and all my data was hosed.
* My next Mac, a 8200, never gave me trouble, but it died on my dad. When he opened the case, there seemed to be enough dust and stuff on the cooling thingy that’s mounted on the CPU to construct a small to mid-sized dog.
* I’ve owned a 7200 that ran Linux and never had any problems, apart from the fact that it was slow as hell.
* I’ve had another harddrive failure in my G4. The G4 also ate a CD-RW drive and a (Microsoft) mouse.
* I’ve seen very strange things happening to the amount of memory in an old Sun I have lying around. Sometimes it’s 512MB, more often it is not. But let’s face it, that Sun (and the memory) is old.
* On new year’s day this year, my server’s harddisk crapped out. This isn’t some personal server, mind you, but one that hosts Real Domains for Real Customers. Most of them were Really Cool under the whole situation, by the way.
* Just recently, the power manager on my PowerBook 1400CS died. It won’t boot, not even after trying every fix for the infamous Green Led Coma I could find.
Not bad for 13+ years of computer usage.
Roly Miller said 1404 days ago:
Sorry to hear of your trouble! I’m glad I’ve quit the freelancing game but I’d still hate to loos my Data.Which Firewire 800 Drive did you purchase? I was considering the Lacie.
I’ll be praying for better fortunes for your data.
Roly
Josh Bryant said 1403 days ago:
Jon,You had 8 months of personal photos? On a laptop? And not backed up anywhere else? Wha?!?!? I am shocked!
1 month with no backup, understandable. 8 months with no backup, asking for it.
Even if you backup drive was currently on the fritz, you could have hooked up to the G5 in target firewire mode and backed to its drive. Trying to defrag a Panther disk on a powerbook is asking for trouble. The apps from TechTool and Norton always seem to make things worse. I have yet to hear from happy users of these tools. The minimal gain you get by defragging is lost in the software glitches that cause hardware problems with these utilities.
I really can’t stress enough how much defragging is really unnecessary for the minimal gain in performance, but I understand old ways die hard and this could be falling of deaf ears.
Better luck with your future hardware!
Cheers
Jon Hicks said 1403 days ago:
Yeah, yeah OK. Its bad enough that I lost all those photos without being whipped for it! Ease off fellas! Grrr!!!Just to clear something up. My freelance work is religiously backed up every night, its just the personal stuff that I was slack about. Yes it badly needed defragging, as the hard drive was spending a long time spinning trying to find data. I agree with Jeremy though – a clean install is the only way to go to properly defrag. Now that I’ve done a clean install, all is much better.
Roly – Yeah its a Lacie Extreme D2. Very good!
Chris said 1403 days ago:
I have only ever had 2 computers in 6 years. My first was a 300mhz Windows 95 beast… lasted me a good 3 years. I then got a 1.9mhz Windows Xp machine and in 6 years (even with windows) i have not once had a single problem with anything I do.I post this as I could not happen but notice the pattern above. ;)
Roly said 1403 days ago:
Thanks Jon.I’m going to order one and back my stuff up!
Thanks for the reminder.
Roly
Chris Hester said 1403 days ago:
One great tool for temporary backups I’ve found is the USB memory stick. These now come quite cheap and can store up to 4Gb! I bought a 512Mb one and managed to fit ALL my digital photos on it, with plenty of room to spare. (Okay, so I don’t take many shots.) For anything you’re working on, they’re ideal.Don’t trust optical media too much. I used pairs of Kodak Gold CDs to back up some files once. Only I needed a large file from one disc and realised I’d only copied it once. Guess what? It was corrupt.
My current system backup method is to use RAID with a removable hard disk. No more spending fruitless hours backing up to endless CDs (which frankly don’t have the room anyway). Now I can forget about finding a time to backup, the backup is happening in real-time for me as I work. It means using twice the capacity of your existing hard drive and seeing only half of it, but I can’t think of a better way. (What I mean is – if you have two 80Gb drives, you don’t get 160Gb. One is a constantly updating copy of the other, invisible to the computer. My reasoning is that you’d simply never back that much up if you had it, so stick to what you need.) Works great!
When the PC switches down, all I have to do is remove the second drive and it is a PERFECT backup – including the program files and everything. (Backing up manually, you always forget some small file that might be useful.)
Sadly I dropped the drive yesterday so it could start to give me problems soon. If that does happen though, all I do is swap in a new one.
I have suffered from hard drive problems in the past from moving and dropping drives. And who hasn’t lost data at some point? Either when a computer was stolen or you deleted it by mistake. So the advice is to back up as much as possible, on as many different devices as you can.
Rob McMichael said 1403 days ago:
Have you updated the iPod with the latest software updates on the apple site. My friend just came back from traveling and I had to use 2 updates on it (the new version) already.If that dosen’t work, try getting iPodRip from the Little app factory (googe it ;) ). Then rip all the music to your drive, format it and set it up again. You may also see a better performance from the battery due to the consistency of the data :)
Hope this helps Jon
Rob
Jon Hicks said 1403 days ago:
The problem is Rob, I can’t actually connect to the iPod at all. The music isn’t a problem, as I have it all on my G5 anyway, but I can’t update or reload the software (although I’m sure it did get the latest update)Jon Van Deurzen said 1403 days ago:
Ipod problem.I ran into the same problem with the Ipod. It would charge just find, but it wouldn’t connect to my PC (yes, Windows). Try “fiddling” with the cable at the base of the ipod (I had to pull up on the cable and then it would connect). I used to wrap the cable around the ipod when travelling between work and home and think that I broke an internal cable. I used Apple’s warranty website and received a free cable and my problem was solved. Now I have 2 cables, 1 for work (power), and 1 for home (mounting & power).
Hope that helps.
Rob McMichael said 1403 days ago:
Oh I see Jon, I think I may have had that problem too with mine and ended up having to apply the update on my Windows machine rather than my Mac.If not send it back to apple or visit the store in london (make sure to tell them who you are :p )
MonkeyBoy said 1402 days ago:
With your iPod have you tried using a USB cable instead of firewire, thats what I use all the time as I don’t have a firewire, but it should work.Stephane said 1401 days ago:
I wrote earlier about my curse too, here the latest. Just got a new iMac G5 last Friday, and after the weekend of thinking that the screen was not as good as I thought, I realized that it’s defective. Going back to the store today on the recommendation from Apple support :-(Nick said 1399 days ago:
Firstly I love the new look.Unless I am misunderstanding you why did you need to buy new discs. Surely Apple should have replaced thge 10.1 discs, you have already bought the license. Then again I have noticed how software vendors, film studios etc want their cake and eat it too.
Two examples. I have lost the original disc of a burning application, I rang the vendor and they said I would have to buy new. I explained that I had only bought the license so it should not be a problem to resupply the disc (I have a genuine serial number a receipt) I would be happy to pay P and P and a reasonable amount for the actual cost of a disc They refused. Ditto for DVDs. Four small children have managed to destroy Monsters Inc three times. Would the shop replace – no way. In the UK it is illegal to even back-up software discs. CDs etc (unlike Germany)
So while they have made it clear that we do not “own” the content, it is just licensed – they won’t play the other half of the game and divvy up when the media fails.
end of rand !!
Nick
Robert Lee said 1396 days ago:
Wow, that’s pretty bad. I should start backing up more regularly.My wife has had some serious problems with her iPod mini – it went completely dead twice, within 2 months from purchase.
In contrast, I am relatively lucky with Apple hardware. I dropped my 2 iBooks several times onto concrete or hardwood floor, but they both carried on working afterwards. More recently, my 15” PowerBook dropped about 5’ to a very hard ceramic tiled floor, causing a substantial dent, but everything continued to run without a hitch.