This weekend’s mini project was recovering the contents of a 30GB 3.5-inch ATA hard drive from a customer’s Power Mac G4. The dusty and cobwebby tower looked like it’d been stored in a shed for the better part of a decade…

The first challenge was that the first couple of interfaces I tried with the drive did not seem to provide enough power. I ended up installing it temporarily inside one of my Power Mac G4 towers, and after tracking down the proper 80 pin ATA cable, it mounted and seemed a bit happier…

However there were still issues with copying files, and so the next step was to try running an old version of DiskWarrior, surprisingly without success. I next ran “Disk Doctor” (remember Norton Utilities?!) which helped to fix up some corruption with the data. Even after that, there were still some files located on bad blocks, which meant doing a standard copy in the Finder was a real pain. I then used “Synchronize! Pro” to ensure I had as complete a copy as possible.

In other news, I watched this morning the latest video put out by “The Serial Port” on YouTube. It’s titled “We brought back the internet’s first search engine”, and goes over the software archaeology of tracking down what could in fact have been the last copy of the Archie server software. Archie was a search engine which would trawl through the contents of a bunch of FTP servers, and was a mainstay of the pre-WWW Internet. I am glad they have managed to track it down, configure it, and now in fact have it running live on the current Web! Someone needs to ask them to bring back Dynix now :P

Currently listening: Orbital live at Leeds Sound City 1996