Hello,

well – so that’s the first entry I type from my little ThinkPad T41 and I’ve the feeling, that it will be not the last one.

On friday I had the idea to put all the small and little disks laying around here into the 4U rack case which lies around unused and put this all together into the 22U rack in the basement to have a solid place for the data we’ve collected over the last few years incl. pictures of our wedding, of our house when it was built from 2005-2006 and about 20GB of self-ripped music from our CDs and around 150 Euros of iTunes music. Of course a lot other date like (yikes! I just recognize while typing) hundreds of Photoshop files (incl. those for this site) and so on and so on. :’(

To make a long story short: I removed one of the 1TB disks from the PC and placed it into the server case. Meanwhile I had installed a Debian on this PC and the last step to have our data secure was to copy the files to the XFS partition. So I tried to mount the NTFS drive. Several times. NTFS-3G in the end told me, that it was not clean unmounted and that I should put this device back to a Windows machine and run chkdsk /p. Ok – not a big story at all, but what I saw gave me a cold shiver on my back. It showed me 4 partitions and an overall capacity of 32MB. Damn!

So I used different tools like the Acronis DiskDirector and several toold from the Hirens Boot CD, no chance. In the end, I gave up. I run some tools and was able to kick the MBR and reinitialize the disk. A WD tool on DOS showed up a size of 931GB – ok – correct size. But – the data is lost.

Luckily, I had a backup of the really important things like the mentioned photos above on three DVD-RAMs. But the mere of the painfully collected data is gone.

Until now, I’m not sure why this happend. Mounting a disk (or trying it with the mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/1tbb) won’t kill data. Maybe it’s because I moved the disk from a Mac RAID to Windows (NTFS) to the Linux OS.

It’s time for a backup plan. Sure – I can live with the lost of the Virtual machines – but the documents and so on need to be placed on a secure media. The most secure one. So I googled and I read in Wikipedia and it turns out, that the DVD-RAM seems to be the most secure one. Ironically I had 12 unused DVD-RAMs at home! DAMN!

So, from now, I will backup important data as well as Photoshop files (which are important for me) to DVD-RAM. No excuses anymore! Windows allows me to use DVD-RAM like a (very slow) harddisk.

Another theme:
A friend of me asked my a few days ago if I could check something inside Vista on the Mac Pro for him. He wanted to know if it shows up 4 or 8 cores in the taskmanager. I was wondering why it just shows up 4 of the 8 cores and so I started watching around the web and I found a little hint, that the Home Premium version that I used on the Mac Pro is limited to 1 processor

WHAT!? Can someone tell me what this is for a kind of shit? Why does a “modern” 64bit just use one processor? Sure, the answer is pretty easy: I should go and by an upgrade to Ultimate. No! Sorry, Microsoft. The Home Premium was expensive enough. This is rude and shows that Microsoft and Apple and all those money-loving companys still think the some. Cut the users possibilities. C’mon. Home Premim – Ultimate. Do you really think, that the kernel is different? Noo!

Finally – I just started thinking if I should run Debian on my Mac Pro. Ironic, isn’t it? The system that crashed my harddisk I think that it was not the reason. But Linux in it’s own way is limited, too. But this depends on Adobe – no Photoshop there :/ So – that’s a no-go. I’m really happy with my Win XP on my ThinkPad here. And currently I was again thinking if it was a soo good idea to buy the Mac Pro and the thoughts about selling it came back.

He – nice deal for everyone who wants to use OSX Mac Pro with 14Gigs of RAM and 2x 1TB Harddisk

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