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Well, it appears the ssd in my Mac mini is failing. Good news is, most of my files are backed up (including all my stories... phew). Mainly the files I stand to loose are master images related to my website, and, while I would be rather bummed to loose them, they're nothing I can't recreate. I am attempting to recover them, but we'll see how that turns out.
I've been planning of ditching the Mac entirely, so the timing isn't all that bad. I've been using the Mac as my writing rig for a while, but it seems I'll be moving everything over to my Windows/linux system sooner than I'd anticipated. Well, wish me luck recovering the files, if my current attempt doesn't work, I've ordered a usb to sata cable and will have to disassemble the entire system(which is a freaking pain in the freaking behind) to remove the ssd. From there hopefully, I can connect the drive to my windows/linux system and pull the files that way. From there, I'll have try and get Windows to recognize the files on my mac, which is also a pain in the behind. Unfortunately, the system was a third party refurb when I purchase it, so there's no barking up Apple's tree for help.
Fun, fun, fun.
Comments
Have fun
I'm probably telling you what you already know, but if you intend to read the Mac drive on the PC you will need software to recognise the drive format. Although if it is tentatively holding together, a network transfer might be less painful. I wish you luck in your venture.
Yes, I know
I'm aware. I was, in the not so distant past, a certified computer technician, but elected to pursue a different career path. I've retained enough to get me by with almost any home pc repair.
At this point I can't even get the system to run for more than a few minutes before i get hit with kernal panic and the system resets on me. I'm attempting to install Mac OS on an external hard drive and if I can get that to boot, I'll attempt to access the files that way. That way I can copy the files to a second exFAT-formatted external drive which Windows will be more than capable of recognizing.
Have delightfully devious day,
Its common for SSD drives
To not even give you a warning like the older style disc drives, so count yourself lucky and get everything off it that you can as fast as you can.
I highly recommend using a secondary disc drive for storage in conjunction with any SSD drive to save irreplaceable files in the event of a drive failure.
For several builds now, I have always used multiple drives, one dedicated for the operating system and other larger drives for storage and backups. This way if my C drive fails, it can be reformatted or replaced without losing everything. I go as far as to remapping the Documents, Downloads and pictures folder to one of the storage drives so even the contents of those are never lost.
Two weeks ago, with my windows 7 operating system starting to show signs of some serious problems. Instead of reformatting, I picked up a 120GB SSD drive and upgraded to windows 10. having set up my system this way, it was really easy to do this without losing files.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Believe me I know all about
Believe me I know all about it, as I said in a previous comment, I was once a certified computer technician. That being said Mac minis don't generally have a lot of room for expansion, particularly those made during 2014 or later like mine. I could have installed a pcie ssd, but I didn't want to invest any more money in the thing than I already had. Most of my files were backed up over a network drive, but there are some files that didn't make it on there before I learned the ssd was failing and by then it was too late.
That being said my desktop has four drives, two ssds one for Linux, one for windows, and 2 hdds for storage. Plus, everything is periodically backed up to my network drive and most of my documents, are also stored on the cloud.
Have delightfully devious day,
Cool so you didn't lose much
at least I assume you didn't.
I used to dual boot, well triple boot actually. Had XP, Win 7 and Linux for awhile. Eventually went straight Win 7 as that is what I had to support at work. With this upgrade I'm still dual booted but only so I can access the old Win 7 drive if I find I missed something I need. I had thought hard about going to Linux only this time around and I really have issues with how Microsuck has hidden so many settings in the system now and makes you bend over backwards to reset those you can find.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
No, I didn't loose too much
No, I didn't loose too much and what I did loose I have now managed to recover.
Yeah, I hate that Microplop has been hiding settings. I don't particularly understand the philosophy, but it's still better than the Mac. I was shocked at how limited they were when I first bought my Mac. They don't even have font scaling for higher screen resolutions, unless you buy a Retina display. I went onto a Mac forum years ago and asked about this and their brilliant solution was to use a lower screen resolution or buy a Retina display.
Have delightfully devious day,
Until recently
Until recently each time I've upgraded a computer, I've always operated with a system drive and a data drive. Usually just moving the data drive from computer to computer. If the data drive started showing unusable segments during regular defrag session, I'd pick up another drive and do a full disk copy on the data drive.
However, my last two purchases have made that not feasible. I now have a tower and a laptop. My wife considers the tower her computer, but I occasionally use it and do all the maintenance on it but the laptop is exclusively mine. I use the tower as a backup machine and have data drive in it. The laptop came configured with a C and D drive. I'm sure that it's only a partitioned single drive, not having looked inside. But laptops being what they are, multiple physical drives aren't likely.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Laptop partitions
It is common now for Windows laptops (and desktops, too) to have a single hard drive with multiple partitions. Usually one large partition will hold the operating system, application programs, and data. Another partition will be a "recovery partition" with the operating system (they don't give you the CD-ROM anymore), in case you need to reformat and reinstall the large partition. Sometimes a third partition will include the software which came with the computer, some of it junk and some not. My HP desktop has two partitions, one labelled OS (C:) of 1.8 TB and one labelled HP_RECOVERY (D:) of 16.3 GB.
Since all these partitions are on the same physical drive, if it starts failing all partitions are at risk. Most laptops don't have the space for a second internal drive, whether SSD or hard disk, so the only practical solutions are either an external drive or cloud storage.
Years ago when I played a bit with Linux, it was common to partition a drive into three partitions: one for the Linux kernel, one for the swap file, and the remainder for everything else. I haven't looked at that for 20 years, so I don't know if that is still usual.
remeber the days...
when a few dvds could back up an entire hd with room to spare...sigh
It's annoying when your drive craps out suddenly without warning. The ssd's are "supposed" to be reliable..apparently not.
Ive never been a mac fan for actual computers because of the pain in the butt to get parts. Pc is easy to get since stores sell them a lot. Macs...not so much.
That being said I do have ipad and old iphone so I do have some mac stuff. Not all that thrilled with the ipad at moment though.
Theoretically, you could
Theoretically, you could still do that, you'd just need a lot more discs. ^_^
I'm not a big Mac fan myself, and using one really did nothing to win me over for the reasons you mentioned above, and just the overall philosophy in general. Frankly, I don't get the hub bub nor did I find that 'everything just works' as I've heard so many Mac fans claim over the years. I bought the thing so I could use Scrivener for Mac, but the 3.0 release is imminent and the Windows version will be 'nearly identical' in functionality so I don't see any need to make use of the Mac version anymore. For now I'll be using the Release Candidate, but it's really stable and I've been using the betas/release candidates on my laptop for a while now anyway.
Have delightfully devious day,
Don't try accessing the drive
Don't try accessing the drive from windows. Put it in the Linux side, and mount it read-only. That'll give you the best chance to get everything. You might even be able to do a ddrescue and clone it to another drive and get the mac running again.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Yeah, have no idea why I didn
Yeah, have no idea why I didn't think of that earlier. I have seen the light, after I posted the blog and the comments I actually tried accessing the partition with a Linux USB stick I had sitting around, but Linux wouldn't mount it even in read only. I did manage to make an image from it, but couldn't get any system to mount that. I even tried opening the image with a couple different archive utilities and no such luck. Right now I'm running Mac OS off an external drive and running a disk recovery utility. It's still going, but it's finding a lot of files so, I'm hopeful I'll be able to get the ones I want that way.
Have delightfully devious day,
RAID System
One good idea is a RAID system. If one drive goes bad, one can still read and write it, while repairing or replacing the bad drive.
-- Daphne Xu
I've considered investing in
I've considered investing in a RAID array in the past, but could never justify the expense. Perhaps some day in the future.
Have delightfully devious day,
Can't you just...?
get a new SSD for the Mac? Obviously if it is a recent one then you can't change them but if I were in your situation then I'd look at just replacing the SSD. Take a time machine backup of the current system, download your version of IOS and burnit to a USB stick and boot off that with the TM backup connected...
If you are going to drop MacOS then go for Linux. If you can replace the SSD then you have a rig ready to run Linux.
There are many YouTube videos about how to replace the SSD in a Mini if you are unsure.
Samantha.
My main problem is recovering
My main problem and only thing I cared about was recovering files that were not backed up but I've now managed to pull them from the drive.
I could replace the ssd, but I really have need of another computer sitting around the house collecting dust. With the release of Scrivener 3.0 for Windows coming, I no longer have a reason to keep the Mac around. They just released a third release candidate and it's stable enough I'm comfortable using it. I could run Linux on the machine, but my Windows machine is a dual boot I so I can already run linux whenever I want.
I may throw a new ssd in the Mac further down the line, get it running and sell it on ebay or I may just sell the parts, but that's something I can do at leisure.
Have delightfully devious day,
Well all...
After a lot of unsuccessful attempts, I've now managed to recover the files I was missing. Phew...
Thanks all for the suggestions and the comments and have a delightfully demented day!
Have delightfully devious day,
Glad I read through all the
Glad I read through all the comments. I was about to put in the add-on you have to put in most of the distributions to read HFS+ partitions. Sorry I hadn't done that earlier. (generally, you can read from them, but not write -but it depends on the distribution)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.