Mac Pro doodied the bed

Wifey went to wake her 4-core Mac Pro (running Snow Leopard, 14 GBs RAM) and found that Adobe Bridge hung itself. Suddenly, the Mac told her she failed to eject a drive properly. It wasn't specific. She then went to close out all the other programs from the tray, and did a reboot. The Mac now hangs to the gray screen with the apple logo and sounds like it's trying to access the main HD repeatedly.

I unplugged it for 15 mins, then plugged it in for 15 seconds and then turned it on (trying to do an SMC reset). No effect.

I hit D while booting, trying to get to Apple's diagnostic. No effect.

I hit option while booting, trying to point the boot process to the DVD instead and try to run from it. The computer came to a gray screen with the mouse cursor and nothing more.

I tried to go to safe mode, hitting Command+Shift+V. Got a black screen, with the computer trying to boot from "\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi" and it was loading kernel cache file something something. Four periods with a blinking cursor... Then nothing for about 5 minutes. Nothing but that sickening sound of it trying to access the hard drive again. Then it reboots itself. Gray screen, more noise.

I want it to be the main hard drive failing, but since I can't get to diagnostics via D I'm concerned about the mobo. Any help? Heading to the Apple store tomorrow so please pray for Marty (the Mac).

Pull out the drive, stick the OS CD in the CDROM, and see what happens. If it successfully boots and all seems well, then it may indeed just be a dead drive.

The CD will refuse to go very far, because it won't see a drive to install to, but that's fine. You're just trying to verify that it starts and shows you correct graphics.

Thought of trying that but it was 3 am. Sent her off to the Genius Bar today. We'll see what happens. Given the nominal upgrade in the new Mac Pro just announced at WWDC and the 8 GB RAM upgrade we fed Marty in April, may just fix it if it's under a grand. The thing runs like a raped ape for what she uses it for.

TheWanderer wrote:

The thing runs like a raped ape for what she uses it for.

I can't tell if that's fast or slow...

ibdoomed wrote:
TheWanderer wrote:

The thing runs like a raped ape for what she uses it for.

I can't tell if that's fast or slow...

Thinking the same thing. Not sure if I want an answer.

Heretk wrote:
ibdoomed wrote:
TheWanderer wrote:

The thing runs like a raped ape for what she uses it for.

I can't tell if that's fast or slow...

Thinking the same thing. Not sure if I want an answer.

I think he's saying it's a widescreen model....

Fast. That means fast.

Looks like it's the second hard drive that died. That means we have a few photo shoots trapped on a dying/dead drive.

I'm looking for some serious help here. What's your best best for data recovery?

SpinRite, I think. Site isn't the best but the guy is legit.

TheWanderer wrote:

Looks like it's the second hard drive that died. That means we have a few photo shoots trapped on a dying/dead drive.

I'm looking for some serious help here. What's your best best for data recovery?

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

or

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/d...

It's not cheap, but what are the photo shoots worth to you?

Coupla grand each. Thanks guys, I'll add this to the list of places we're looking into.

Edit: This looks like software? I think the clutch in the disk itself is bad. What then?

I haven't had to send a drive off in years (backups TW, tsk tsk). I'll see if I can find who I used before.

Who made the drive? I know Seagate offers a service (https://services.seagate.com/).

Any old CDW buddies could offer a suggestion perhaps?

EDIT: Found it. I have used DRG in the past. Only failed me once, and I didn't blame them for the failure. It was an extreme case.

If it's a hardware problem, then a data recovery company is pretty much your only option. Physical failure like that is extra difficult to recover from; drives need extraordinarily clean conditions on the inside, and having the clean-room facilities necessary to open up and do a repair on that kind of drive, even a temporary fix, is EXPENSIVE.

Drive factories are some of the cleanest places on the planet. Even one speck of dust in a drive mechanism can do terrible damage to the media surface.

Ouch. I think someones going to do time machine in the future...

I've used Drive Savers once, went fine, took a couple days, cost less than a grand but they were legal documents the idiot didn't keep backups of and was required to.

Expensive lesson.

Every bit of data that does not get backed up is a bit of data that should be considered already lost. You're just waiting for the clock to run out on your one and only point of failure.

I had a bad drive I was trying to pull some info off about a year or two ago. The problem may have been a bad circuit board on the drive, but you never know this may work for you as well.

I had some limited success freezing the drive in a zip lock bag for like an hour then sitting it on one of those gel packs you use for injuries. I plugged it in as an external drive to a different computer and uploaded as much as I could before it failed again. You might be able to do the same. Who knows it may hold up long enough to get all those pics you need.

Gaald wrote:

I had a bad drive I was trying to pull some info off about a year or two ago. The problem may have been a bad circuit board on the drive, but you never know this may work for you as well.

I had some limited success freezing the drive in a zip lock bag for like an hour then sitting it on one of those gel packs you use for injuries. I plugged it in as an external drive to a different computer and uploaded as much as I could before it failed again. You might be able to do the same. Who knows it may hold up long enough to get all those pics you need.

That reminds me, circuit boards on those puppies are a piece of cake to swap with another identical drive. I've done that a few times and found the data intact. Obviously it won't help in an instance of platter crash though....

Lots of sage advice about backing up here. Nothing I've not already instructed my wife on. We built this box, and the cascading set of external hard drives supporting it, so that she would always have two copies, never one copy, and ocaisionally three copies (when she was done making the third, she was only then supposed to delete the first). She screwed up.

Good news is that the backup she was trying to do before the crash succeeded: We still have the wedding she was worried about. And out trip to Maui.

Bad news is that there was more than just the wedding on there. She lost her entire camping trip to the Lakota reservation in the Badlands. We're still sending it out to a place, forget which she picked, so they can tear it apart in a clean room. We'll see how much they charge us. Quote first, retrieve second, or no charge for them to send it back.

The best news is that now her business is so brisk that we need to automate her backups. I've been looking at the Western Digital Sentinel system, 4 drives RAID with 4 TBs of storage. But I don't feel that she needs all the features. Frankly, if the operating system drive goes we can get another one and re-load the OS. We don't need Timemachine for that. What we need is a way to keep all her photography work, which is right now under a single TB and revolving (she deletes old stuff/moves to archival DVD to make room), backed up as safe as possible at all times. And then we need that backed up in a safe deposit box on a monthly basis.

The architecture of the Mac Pro is thus:

Single 320 for the OS and sundries.
Single 7.2k 1 TB scratch disk for Photoshop to work in.

We can add up to 2 more drives, by my count, and fill the Mac Pro. That would potentially RAID the scratch disk. But we want that scratch disk as fast as possible because thats where she does all the hard work of Photoshopping.

So, I'm considering adding another 1 TB disk internally. This would be for "warm" storage of new photoshoots fresh of the CF card from the camera. Meanwhile, the existing 1 TB would continue to be the scratch disk. Workflow would be to move a dozen photos or so from warm storage to the scratch disk, work on them, finish them, and then put them back in warm storage. Then, nightly backups from that warm storage disk to the external hard drive. Then monthly backups of that external drive to another external that lives in the safety deposit box. Does that sound crazy? If not what's the most secure and economical to use as an external backup? Let's say we want to grow each of the two external backups to 2 TBs.

I'm still at CDW, but I've been in contracts for like 2 years. I have no clue what the pro-sumer space looks like anymore for IT tech.

I've always heard good things about Drobo drives

indy wrote:

I've always heard good things about Drobo drives

NO! Run!

I have an 8 bay drobo pro. It's unreliable and extremely slow at best, even over iscsi. It drops off frequently and requires rebooting, it was a total pain to setup initially on both windows and mac. This is the second one after I returned the first for the same issues and drobo replaced it.

Since the market for storage appliances is so vast, there's no reason to pay more for a machine that may or may not perform perfectly. Get a nice thecus, qnap, synology or even a promise.

For a scratch disk, wouldn't you want an SSD?

TheWanderer wrote:

Lots of sage advice about backing up here. Nothing I've not already instructed my wife on. We built this box, and the cascading set of external hard drives supporting it, so that she would always have two copies, never one copy, and ocaisionally three copies (when she was done making the third, she was only then supposed to delete the first). She screwed up.

Good news is that the backup she was trying to do before the crash succeeded: We still have the wedding she was worried about. And out trip to Maui.

Bad news is that there was more than just the wedding on there. She lost her entire camping trip to the Lakota reservation in the Badlands. We're still sending it out to a place, forget which she picked, so they can tear it apart in a clean room. We'll see how much they charge us. Quote first, retrieve second, or no charge for them to send it back.

The best news is that now her business is so brisk that we need to automate her backups. I've been looking at the Western Digital Sentinel system, 4 drives RAID with 4 TBs of storage. But I don't feel that she needs all the features. Frankly, if the operating system drive goes we can get another one and re-load the OS. We don't need Timemachine for that. What we need is a way to keep all her photography work, which is right now under a single TB and revolving (she deletes old stuff/moves to archival DVD to make room), backed up as safe as possible at all times. And then we need that backed up in a safe deposit box on a monthly basis.

The architecture of the Mac Pro is thus:

Single 320 for the OS and sundries.
Single 7.2k 1 TB scratch disk for Photoshop to work in.

We can add up to 2 more drives, by my count, and fill the Mac Pro. That would potentially RAID the scratch disk. But we want that scratch disk as fast as possible because thats where she does all the hard work of Photoshopping.

So, I'm considering adding another 1 TB disk internally. This would be for "warm" storage of new photoshoots fresh of the CF card from the camera. Meanwhile, the existing 1 TB would continue to be the scratch disk. Workflow would be to move a dozen photos or so from warm storage to the scratch disk, work on them, finish them, and then put them back in warm storage. Then, nightly backups from that warm storage disk to the external hard drive. Then monthly backups of that external drive to another external that lives in the safety deposit box. Does that sound crazy? If not what's the most secure and economical to use as an external backup? Let's say we want to grow each of the two external backups to 2 TBs.

I'm still at CDW, but I've been in contracts for like 2 years. I have no clue what the pro-sumer space looks like anymore for IT tech.

I have users that do what you're doing but our budgets may differ. Here's what I do with mac pro CS folks.

One 256gb SSD for the OS/apps. One 256gb SSD for scratch. One 2tb 7200rpm rotating for local storage. When they are finished with a project, they are to offload the data to the network server so that could be your external storage system with built in redundancy. I setup time machine and let it do everything to our time machine server.

If I were going to do this without network servers involved, I would buy a firewire or iscsi 4 bay external storage device with built in raid (1 or 5), and fill it with 2tb drives that the storage manufacturer has on the tested and approved list (very important). That's 8tb unraided, do raid 5 and you've got 6tb unformatted so ~5.5 all said and done. Then section that off if you wish, but use it for time machine and long term storage. Make sure you setup the health monitoring so when, and that really is a WHEN, a drive starts to hiccup, you are notified immediately to replace the failing drive.

Also, I only use important storage hard drives for 2 years regardless of the 5 year warranty. They are so damn cheap, there's simply no reason to take risks. I cycle half of them every year and let the appliances handle raid rebuilding on a weekend of no use.

Great advice. I have no experience with RAID rebuilding. Can you unpack your process for that for me?

Love the scratch SSD disk idea, and I'm watching the prices fall as we speak, but we need to reserve budget for camera gear this year. Backup is the first priority. What would just the external HD piece of this look like price wise?

ibdoomed wrote:
indy wrote:

I've always heard good things about Drobo drives

NO! Run!

Many times this.

From personal experiences Drobo is neat in theory but fails in practice.

Synology has never let me down.

/knocks_on_wood

RAID rebuilding is what it has to do after you replace a failed drive. The array is vulnerable while it is rebuilding. He's pulling a drive (failing it) and replacing it with another, initiating a rebuild.

LilCodger wrote:

RAID rebuilding is what it has to do after you replace a failed drive. The array is vulnerable while it is rebuilding. He's pulling a drive (failing it) and replacing it with another, initiating a rebuild.

This. They are raid 6 arrays and I do one at a time meaning during the rebuild, if a drive fails, no big deal.

I'm impartial to qnap, synology, promise, or thecus and only have recent experience with promise (have several 16 bay units). I also don't know which ones are highly mac friendly so maybe someone else can chime in.

I do like the lacie systems for macs and have dozens of their external drives floating around, some over 5 years old and haven't failed. They are extremely mac friendly. You might consider something like a lacie 4big quad: https://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/L...

some other zach wrote:

Synology has never let me down.

+1 for Synology. I back up locally to my NAS and also do cloud backups to Amazon S3 using Arq on my Mac.

Oi... I was looking for like a $500 solution. Hm. Gonna have to sell the wifey on spending this much money. It's her business after all, but still. More than expected.

TheWanderer wrote:

Oi... I was looking for like a $500 solution. Hm. Gonna have to sell the wifey on spending this much money. It's her business after all, but still. More than expected.

And yet less than the loss of a single job? Sometimes people can't see reason until a disaster strikes. It's like homeowners insurance. Would you own a six figure house without insurance?

The way to budget for backups, TheWanderer, is to think about how much it will cost you when you lose data. (You WILL lose data, even if you got lucky this time.) Then think about how much you're willing to spend to keep that from happening, and do the best backup you can within that budget.