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How Panther Ate My Hard Drive
It all started on Wednesday when the courier arrived at my work with some pretty black boxes with silver X's on them. Myself and my fellow worker who were taking the plunge were very happy to see them. In retrospect the joy was unfounded. I installed the update (using archive and install) on my beloved TiBook 1Ghz, and all went fairly smooth. Things felt snappier, they looked very brushed silver (I'm still not decided that this is a good or bad thing at this point), and it was shiny and new. I had that great feeling when you get that new toy and play with it exclusively, but sadly this didn't last very long ... and in fact it went downhill pretty quickly.
At around the same time as this, my colleague also did the same type of install on his Quicksilver, with his FW800 drive attached. Things didn't go so well for him. After the first reboot the drive would no longer mount. Panther complained that it wasn't partitioned, or that it was not able to read it. His first reaction was to call me, the tech support person, over to take a look. At first look it seemed that it just needed some repairs run on it. After trying to analyze the drive with every piece of diagnostics software in my arsenal I started to worry quite a bit more. At this same point in time I also discovered this thread on Apple's discussion forums showing that we were not alone in this problem, and it was in fact rather widespread. Now I was really starting to worry.
We spent a day trying to use Data Rescue X, as it was suggested in the Apple forums, and seemed to work for a lot of the people. This extremely long procedure yielded in a complete file and folder list of the drive contents before Panther ate it, but the problem is when they were recovered there was not a single usable file to be found in the 196,000 files recovered.
From here I decided to take a different tact. I contacted Marko from SubrosaSoft.com. Being the very kind and giving person that he is, he offered to help assist in recovering this drive if we could, and given his qualifications I was extremely happy to have his help (Marko is the author of DiskGuardian).
Suspecting (and hoping) that it was merely a missing partition map, as most speculation seemed to point to on the discussion forums, we proceeded on the adventure. After hours of debugging, some incredible programming magic by Marko, and much fighting, it seemed like we were there. There was a reconstructed partition map in place, and raring to go. Panther still complained about the drive being damaged, even with the new partition maps in place, so the next step was to run some diagnostics on the device.
Of all of the tools that I ran on the drive (too many to list), the only one that came up with anything that seemed remotely useful was DiskWarrior, so we decided to take our chances as it said it could recover at least some of the missing data. After it was finished there were some 1551 files on the drive, none of the original folders or trees but instead in a folder DiskWarrior made to put the recovered data in with all of the files loose.
The short story? There were exactly 3 files on the recovered drive that worked, and they were all simple MP3 files that were not incredibly useful. The rest of the almost 200G of data are gone, seemingly for good. It seems that much more than the partition map was destroyed by Panther. In hindsight I think that the other disk repair utilities were more correct than DiskWarrior, as they all said that the drive had nothing on it to recover.
The Moral of this story? Be cautious of being an early adopter, especially with .0 releases. History has proven that you are taking your chances when you go this route. The frustration of the story? Apple has not been forthcoming, until this morning, that there was even a possibility that there might be data loss with FireWire 800 drives, even though their discussion forums had been humming with horror stories of the like since the day of Panther's release.
For anyone out there taking the Panther plunge ... if you have a Firewire 800 drive, using the Oxford 922 chipset, unplug it. Do not under any circumstance plug it back in, during or after installation until this gets cleared up by Apple and/or Oxford. Apple seems to be pointing the blame at Oxford for this problem, but the unsettling part of it is that the exact same drives didn't get eaten by Jaguar, so in my eyes the blame may lie elsewhere.
Happy Panterhing!
| Discussions? --- Interact with the writers and other readers... |
| apple mac mini | aidan geary |
| we would like to trade links :cyphe | hugo arias |
| we would like to trade links :cyphe | hugo arias |
| Re: .0 releases? this is 10.3! | |
| .0 releases? this is 10.3! | macsux |
| Re: bleeding edge | Hello, my name is Johnny |
| bleeding edge | no thanks |