Well, I’ve identified the problems and solutions for the various technical problems I’ve been suffering. All of the problems are hard drive related.

The TiVo drive is likely shot, but they want me to try reformatting it first – can’t hurt.

The drive in the Quad was corrupted, but I was able to recover all the data I’d changed since my last full backup. I purchased Disk Warrior, but it wasn’t able to help¹. I’m going to try to use it as a maintence tool to help avoid these issues in the future. I’m reformatting the drives now and hope to be back up and running from my backup this afternoon.

I’m 90% sure that the PowerBook drive is shot. I’ve ordered a replacement that should be here on Tuesday. I’ll boot it up one more time before then to try to clone the drive or back it up again in some manner, but until then it stays off.

The local Apple Store would only install the same drive I currently have in the machine (80GB, 5400rpm). CompUSA said they would do the repair but they didn’t have the right drive either, were expensive and I had very little faith in them after talking to the tech.

A call back to the Apple Store to verify that they couldn’t do the upgrade netted me a referral to The Mac Outlet, a local Mac shop. A quick call convinced me that they were definitely the right choice for the job. I’m also going to have them look at my dead dual G4 – if it’s just the power supply, I’ll probably have them fix it.

I also called my insurance company. I’ve got a computer specific policy that covers all this stuff and it sounds like most, if not all of this will be covered. That’s good.

Tomorrow I think I’ll be spending some quality time making sure my backup system is 100% up and running again. I may add a couple more external drives to the mix as well to schedule clones as well as network backups.

Time and money spent on backup systems is well spent.

1. Talking with some other folks, this seems to be a common thing. [back]