Steph's MacBook is affectionately known as the FrankenMac. It was built from the parts of 3 other MacBooks. The other night it started going into what seemed like swap death. Turned out to be catastrophic hard disk failure. Also, in what can only be described as a massive oversight, her laptop was not being Time Machined (whoops).

Anyway, after trying and failing to read the disk back using targeted disk mode plus dd_rescue on another Mac, I ended up swapping the disk into my Thinkpad last night and booting an Ubuntu LiveCD, ran dd_rescue and copied the hard disk image to an external hard drive. The filesystem is a little corrupted, and OSX can't read it... but Linux can! [Gotta say, this surprised me.]

I probably could have just booted the Mac itself with a LiveCD, but after targeted disk mode didn't work, I was worried it might be a logic board failure (let's just say Apple and I have a jaded history regarding logic boards). Also, I forgot for a bit that Macs can run Linux.

Since it did just seem to be a bad disk, I went and bought a new hard disk today, and have just successfully gotten the machine reinstalled and running again. The FrankenMac lives again!

So in summary, I am secretly brilliant, and Steph now has a 500GB USB harddisk to use with Time Machine.

> Read More... | Digg This!