I Love My Mac

I recently acquired an old PowerPC Powermac G5 slated for a scrapheap. I thought I'd use it for my son; he's four, but he loves playing little flash games and watching DVD's, so to keep our own systems intact I get old systems that are barely adequate for use but have enough oomph to still do the job. At this point he was using a secondhand eMac; an all-in-one unit that had the monitor/CPU in one gumdrop-shaped unit (actually it reminds me of the nose of the space shuttle) that had an 80 gig drive and 512 meg of RAM and a G4 processor.

This unit was a G5 with 512 meg of RAM and a slightly new OS as well as a DVD burner instead of just a reader. I stripped the RAM from the G4 and upped the Powermac to 1 Gig of RAM. I then spent some time doing updates and installing items like NeoOffice and FireFox, then fended my little guy off while running Carbon Copy Cloner to an external LaCIE 160 gig external drive with combination USB/Firewire interface.

He loved it. His games no longer stuttered! Sure, the thing was running on the now-largely-unsupported PowerPC platform, but as long as his web stuff ran he was in heaven.

I was reminded of just why I loved the Mac for home users. I created an account for my son with the "simplified" Finder interface and limited the applications on the menus to just a few of the necessities, as well as creating an account for my daughter to use when she needed a desktop instead of her EEE PC for schoolwork (or more likely her iPod Nano). Simple for him to use, very very few exploits for the Mac, and far fewer worries on my part that he'd get into something he shouldn't.

Today I saw my wife had been doing something on it and left it logged in as the administrator user (I'm not really locking this down, just trying to keep it running for my little guy, so it's the only computer that everyone but my son has the admin password for in case it needed updates and to install a printer). At logoff it locked up tight.

Weird, I thought to myself. I hard-killed the CPU with the power switch and booted it back up. After sitting for quite awhile the dreaded folder icon appeared mid-screen. It couldn't find the Finder folder.

Crap.

Reboot with the mouse button down, opening the CD tray. Insert an old OS X CD, power up holding the C key to boot from that drive. Exit the installer and run Disk Utility. It found several errors before telling me it couldn't fix the drive.

I did some research and found that holding the option key will bring up a boot disk selection manager. Plugging in the external drive via firewire, I booted with option held down...must waiting yielded just the CD ROM drive to boot from.

Power down, plug in the drive via USB, try again. Same result.

I found some information on zapping PRAM and resetting NVRAM and OpenFirmware to get the external drive to appear. I didn't feel like trying that one next...I decided to try my favorite tool, Firewire Target Disk Mode. I love that ability of the Macintosh! It's saved my bacon on a couple occasions. If you're unfamiliar with that ability, it allows the Mac to boot into a mode where it appears to be a Firewire hard drive, and you can hook it up to other computers like any other external hard disk. In that mode you can run repair utilities, copy files from one system to another, or install a newer version of OS X if, for example, you want to install on a system that doesn't have a working DVD drive but have another Mac that does.

I found the key to hold...T...and rebooted the Mac, hoping that the old PowerPC G5 wasn't too old to have that ability. A wave of hope hit me when on the monitor a giant Firewire icon started dancing around. It worked.

I took out an Intel Macbook and connected my LaCie external drive to the USB port, then my dual Firewire cable to the G5 and MacBook. Oddly enough just the DVD-ROM with the bootable install disk showed up on my MacBook (it was in the PowerMac). I opened Disk Utility on the MacBook, and after some chugging it showed the hard drive (and CD drive) on the PowerMac. At this point I was fairly certain that if the drive wasn't bad, hardwarewise, that the filesystem was toasted on it so I wiped the partition with a new one. Then I fired up Carbon Copy Cloner, set the source to the external LaCIE drive and the target to the new partition I created on the PowerMac, and let it go with a bit-by-bit copy.

As I type this it has been running for 35 minutes and copies 2.4 gig of data. It should restore most of the data from when I first got it, which wasn't that long ago.

Hopefully it will be done in a couple hours and I'll be able to try rebooting the PowerMac to see if it was successful. If not I'll probably end up trying to get a new SATA drive to install in the PowerMac.

Either way...this is a wonderful lesson in having a working backup. There are many cases where I have saved my own bacon using Linux but there are times I truly wish I could get a PC to boot into a "target disk mode" like the Mac, or even having easy to use drive utilities like CarbonCopyCloner. The closest I can come to it is a system requiring a bootable CD to image partitions to an external disk. Slightly easier is doing work in a virtual machine because then I just power down the machine and copy the virtual machine's disk drive file to another drive or directory. It's nice to have the ability built right into hardware.

But this approach does underscore a couple issues...similar to information rot on the Internet (as I posted about recently, see the archives or use search) I needed to know if the machine even supported these features. Some Macs use IDE drives, some use SATA, some support booting from external disks and some didn't. You can't just use a Mac and expect this to work.

Similarly, in order to really use these features you probably need at least two Macs handy, which is of course rather expensive. I haven't tested it but the Mac in Firewire Target Disk Mode should allow it to connect as a Firewire drive to any machine that supports external Firewire drives; but I doubt you could easily perform certain functions like actually installing OS X from the host to the target Mac or using the target Mac as a bootable disk. And of course the host has to understand the HFS+ filesystem in order to actually see the data on the drive.

On the other hand it is nice to be able to use an iPod as a backup drive (or bootable disk) for times like this when you're stuck in a bind.

I love my Mac. I have issues with it, but I can't recommend them enough for home users, and I certainly wouldn't balk at being forced to use them as my main machine. I can only hope that Linux eventually gets the user-friendly features OS X has now...or that OS X gains the flexibility and power of Linux tools.

Anyone out there have stories relating when they realized that they had a definite preference for a given platform, Linux, Windows, or OS X? Amiga? :-)

Edit: The drive is, indeed, toast. It's a hardware failure. I ordered a new SATA drive, but unfortunately it won't be here until Tuesday. Then I'll get it installed and start the re-clone from the backup drive so Matthew can have his machine back. On the plus side, I removed the existing drive to see how much of a problem it was going to be...can I say again that working on the PowerMac's hardware is a joy compared to so many other machines I've been sliced open on or had to fight with? I popped off a panel (no tools), removed an airflow panel of some lexan-like transparent plastic (no tools), disconnected the SATA power and drive cables from the drive, and slid it out on the rails. At first I thought it was stuck...turned out the rails have an innovative dual-rail system in it so that the front of the drive naturally slides at an angle as you remove the drive so it doesn't catch on the edge of the case or cables. I'll need the screwdriver only to screw in the screws that allow the drive to sit on the guiderails. I think the Mac is the first system I've had hardware failure and I'm actually consoled because the fix isn't quite as much of a pain in the arse that I thought it would be!

Edit 2: The new hard drive arrived...hooked up the backup drive via USB to the MacBook, then the MacBook to the PowerMac via FireWire cable, and fired up Carbon Copy Cloner to re-image again.

The MacBook first burped an error when connecting the PowerMac (with the new blank drive installed) saying that the disk wasn't usable; I opened Disk Utility and told it to partition the drive then erase it. Carbon Copy Cloner then saw the drive, and in about an hour (the previous attempt took around 5 hours as I recall...then it failed) the copy and verify were done.

Eject both drives, put everything away, crossed my fingers and rebooted the PowerMac. It booted, good as new! My boy is very happy to have his machine back again!