October 22, 2007
Facing Fears In The Robot Wars
NP: Pandora
So, I've been dreading a full Windows re-install for what seems like months, but now that I think about it, that solution might not be so bad, and may actually have been the correct solution all along.
Some of you might recall the whole hard drive fiasco back in April. The short version is that my main hard drive crashed, and in trying to restore it, I accidentally overwrote my MP3 drive. At the time, the MP3 drive was my primary concern -- and I've since re-ripped as much of my CD collection as wasn't on my iPod -- but it dawns on me that the core problem was that my old drive had bad sectors that wrecked some critical files. Eventually, I successfully cloned the drive and swapped it out, but that means I either copied the corrupted files or ignored them.
Gee, do you think that might affect system performance? This is where my tendency for knowing just enough about something to be dangerous comes into play, as I've spouted on and on about all these possible causes for this box to suck, but not exhaustively enough to catch one that perhaps should have been obvious.
I'm still a little bit afraid of the rebuild option, in part because I'm still worried it might not work, and also because I'm not 100% confident I've located and backed up all the files and settings I might need for various programs to get myself back in business without too many problems.
As you might imagine, more updates as they become available.
Comments
How to fix Windows PC problems:
http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/get_a_mac-cart_480x376.mov
Yeah, yeah, I know. But if all of this resulted from a failed hard drive, that's at least somewhat platform independent, isn't it?
Hard drives fail in different ways... in your case, it seems like data corruption occurred but the hard drive was operational.
That can be due to purely software and/or operating system problems, a disk surface problem, other types of mechanical failure, or some combination.
There is a spectrum of failures that may be solely hardware-related, or software-related, or somewhere in between.
In some of these error conditions, the drive and/or operating system should detect the problem and work around it.
Of course, if the problem is too severe or the drive is just too broken, things just won't work as we would like.
But I think overall, Mac OS X is far superior to Windows, in many respects, but importantly, more stable with respect to hard disk use and data reliability.
Mac OS X hard drive formating supports journaling, allowing easier data recovery if necessary.
But the increased stability of the OS X operating system, and the higher quality of OS X applications generally means data corruption is a far, far less likely probability on OS X versus some other operating systems.
Not to mention the far superior security inherent in OS X- no harm or damage occurring from viruses, spyware and other assorted malware which constantly plagues WIndows.
Even further, no intrusive security software is necessary. On Windows, this requirement destabilizes the operating system further, causes additional problems not suffered by OS X users.
So, you're better off on OS X and very likely would not have suffered a problem.
And new OS X version, Leopard, released at the end of this week includes Timeline, making backups almost effortlessly, as further precaution to keep your valuable data safer.
Mr. Jobs, don't you have better things to do than troll random blogs?
I get it. Really, I do. But unless I'm given a Mac with a money-back guarantee if I can't get all my legacy stuff (mostly desktop recording, and simply running a Windows DAW under an emulator seems like a really bad idea) operational, along with paid time off to make the switch, it ain't gonna happen.
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