Holy Shit Brothers.

I had a kernel panic earlier. I don't know what caused it but one minute everything was fine I get up to get a print out from the printer bang allocation trap blah blah blah. It may have been caused by a power fluctuation. I live in an old house. When I use my Brother printer it dims the lights.

What ever it was I lost my boot drive and two of my most important data drives. Techtool took 5 hours to repair the boot drive. Techtool could not resurrect the other two drives. Finally DiskWarrior 3.0.3 was able to bring them back to life.

It was a proverbial nightmare. I try to back up as much as I can. But I hadn't in a while. I thought I had lost most of what I have done in 2007. Some of it I can reproduce but much of it would have been lost forever.

I think I am officially going to have total backup drives that are off site.

Last week the Western Digital 120GB Passport which is a nice little convenient travel drive went belly up. Parts are rattling around inside. Not sure if I had anything new on it. This drive literally could not handle just being in a bag that gets transported. I only used it when I set it up then around 4 weeks later it would not mount on the desktop. Total mechanical failure.

On older Macs without built in USB 2.0 these drives are a crap shoot using PCI USB 2.0 cards. They are handy to have so I replaced the WD with a Hitachi. The Hitachi will only mount using the built in USB 1.1 port on my MDD. The Hitachi came with a double USB cord so you can use two USB ports to supply enough power. Still no go with the Belkin USB 2.0 PCI card I have.

This is all to nerve racking.

Wow, what a nightmare indeed. It sounds like DiskWarrior came to the rescue and you got most of your data back. That's a very good thing. Yeah, nothing beats off-site storage. I weekly take my hole data folder (basically my "Jobs" folder) and burn it onto DVD for off-site storage. It's not a backup of the whole OS and programs, but it's the stuff that would be hardest to get back.

The lights dimmed? I assume then the Brother printer is a laser printer. Even at that these printers only pull about 7 amps or so when the heater kicks in and shouldn't dim the lights on what is probably a 20 amp circuit. Either you have too many high amperage devices connected to that circuit or you have a poor connection somewhere between the fuse or circuit breaker panel and the outlet.

How long do the lights stay dim? During the whole printing process or just for a second when the heater first kicks in? Something wrong with the printer and it is pulling a lot of current when it first kicks in?

You should check out the wiring. If it is a poor connection that means you are getting a voltage drop across the connection and generating significant heat at the connection. Although by code all electrical connections are supposed to be made inside a metal box you can't really know if some years back some amateur electrician just spliced a couple of wires together and taped them up and you could have a real chance of fire in the walls or in the basement or attic, wherever the wire runs.

I think you are right associating the dim lights with the computer problems. The lights dim because the circiut voltage dropped from its normal 120 VAC to 100 or 90 or 80 VAC and electronic devices hate low voltage. It drives them haywire and could damage them. My guess would be that if you plugged in so many devices that you pulled so many amps as to dim the lights significantly you would have blown the fuse or tripped the circuit breaker. I seriously suspect a rather dangerous poor connection somewhere. What else is on this circuit? No toaster ovens or electric space heaters I take it?

Holy shit, that's some bad news. I feel sorry for you.

And it makes me think about finally using my new external Backup-Drive. It sits there, 400GB not used. Yeah, i rarely work at home these days, but of course i have lots of data to backup.

Those failing 2,5" drives are common. I had one 20gig IBM failing last year, doing the rattling.
Now i put my new 2,5" external drive (an 80gig hitachi) into a bubble-bag for shock absorbing.

I bought an external drive a few months ago to make my backups easier. I had my doubts about using a 2.5" model with a USB 2 card so I opted for a 3.5" with USB 2 and Firewire. I don't have USB 2 on my old Mac so I use the Firewire port. Works great. It was on a deep discount sale and combining this with an additional discount card I got in the mail I purchased it for next to nothing.

Firewire is also still faster, especially on Macs. Although USB2s 480Mbs seems faster compared to Firewires 400Mbs, but in reality the overhead of the USB-Protocol eats up the throughput.

Of course USB2 cases are cheap as shit these days, but i would still buy firewire/usb combo cases.

WiebeTech makes the Cadillac of combo external enclosures.

The Brother laser printer I have when it starts printing pulls a lot of amps. It is the only draw back to it. It is a networked printer so I can always move it to another outlet or another room.

This house is old. Half of the electric might still be on nob and tube. I may have had on one to many lights as at the same time this is happening the ancient refrigerator I have is no longer maintaining a cool enough temperature to keep milk so my Landlord was in the apartment then his nephew which is not usual. I was trying to look online at different models I printed something out looked back at the screen which didn't have the kernel panic box in the middle informing you to restart but the white text over black terminal code. That is a signal of a major malfunction.

The odd thing was the 2 data drives having their directories messed up. At first I thought the 2 data drives affected were both in an external SATA enclosure. But one was in the machine one in the enclosure. They were not as messed up as the boot drive. The worst was having to wait thru 5 hours or more of Techtool rebuilding the OS drive. I had to wait to see if the data was lost or not. Techtool was able to see all the drives. It would only fix the drive with the OS on it. It would say the data drives were fixed but they were not. DiskWarrior 3.0.3 could not really even see the affected drives until after running Techtool on them. Once I ran Techtool then DiskWarrior could see the other drives Techtool claimed to have repaired. DiskWarrior was able to succesfully repair them after that. I am using an old version of Techtool pro 4.0.2 which may be the first version of the Mac OS X native Techtool. This could play a factor in it's lack of success in rebuilding the data drives. DiskWarrior 3.0.3 is fairly recent I think. I have found this combination of the two in the past was needed in similar circumstances.

In the end knock up on wood no data lost. A new refrigerator is being delivered which should save me a bundle of money on electric. The old model that is leaving looks to be from at least the 1970's. The brand is Admiral. Under the name it says dual-temp which basically means there is separate freezer and refrigerator compartments. No question the electric needs to be upgraded. My best bet would be to upgrade to a new apartment.

I'll have to remember the TechTool/DiskWarrior combo. It sounds like both Superman and Batman coming to the rescue.

An old refrigerator was on the same circuit? I guess that would do it!

That WiebeTech is indeed a nice enclosure.

In the end I paid $49.95 for my USB 2/Firewire combo with the 500GB 3.5" 7200 RPM drive and AC adapter included. The cost of the 2.5" WiebeTech empty case alone is $119.95 plus another $24.95 for the adapter.

My drive was on sale the week before I purchased it for $119.95 ($80.00 off) however the store had failed to remove the sale price from the shelf and it is corporate policy to sell the product for the price the store displays so the price to me was adjusted at the register. Since it wasn't really on sale the $50 discount card (only good for non-sale items) I received in the mail to "celebrate" the opening of the new branch store was now good. So I presented it. Additionally, the cash register dutifully printed out a $20 mail-in coupon with my receipt so I mailed it in and received a $20 check. So, $49.95! The whole business visibly irritated the store manager who had to make the price adjustment. I could tell he wasn't real happy to see me walk out of the store with that item for that price. Too bad! Hitting these promotions just right sometimes results in stuff for damn near free.

I'm pleased you were able to recover your data.

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When I use my Brother printer it dims the lights.

I used to have the same problem with my HP laser printer when I moved into my house 10 years ago. An electrician checked the lines and told me that they weren't overloaded, but were "sensitive" because they were one grade thinner than current standards. The solution was that he installed a dedicated line and outlet from the circuit box to the room I use for my home office for my computer system, isolated from the line my regular outlets are on. It wasn't very expensive.
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Luckily there is a separate service for the refrigerator. All the lights on the other hand may or may not be on the same breaker. Things were just out of sync at the time of failure.

I just watched an Adam Sandler movie Punch Drunk Love. His character spots a similar promotinal screw up for frequent flyer/miles thru Healthy Choice food products. He quickly realizes that buying enough of the Healthy Choice 4 pack Puddings he can get a million frequent flyer miles enough to last a lifetime. It was an oddly funny movie.

That is good to know you can say hey you have it on the shelf for the sale price. Those sales change quickly. My landlard is good for those deals. He had found a sale on an HP laser jet printer 1810 coupled with an HP rebate the printer cost like $15.

Wiebetech's are more expensive but they are quality products. They do have a cheaper 3.5 enclosure which come with the adapter. One thing Wiebetech does is throw in all the cables you need. The 2.5 model I linked draws power threw the FW or USB connection. You don't really need a power adapter. Though FW is more reliable for the right amount of power. In the end it would have been cheaper for me to get the Wiebetech and a drive to put in it.

Boy oh boy was I ever pleased when it was all over with. Now the job at hand is backing up before it happens again.

Techtool has an eDrive feature that allows you to set up an emergency boot partition that takes up about 5GB of space. You can use the eDrive to quickly fix problems as it can store back up directory copies of your various drives. My copies are old I checked. TechTool is at 4.5.2 and Diskwarrior is now at 4 but 3.0.3 is the most up to date for PPC. Alsoft offers a disk image that can be made into a bootable cd for Diskwarrior updates. Techtool does not offer this feature. I could intall Techtool 4.0.2 and update it to 4.1.2 but you can not create a bootable cd. On the latest 4.5.2 cd is a disk image you can create a bootable cd of Techtool 4.1.2. This is for later model PPC on I think X.3 users. Now why cant Micromat just post this disk image is beyond me.

I think it is time to create a FW emergency repair disk. Finding the time will help.

Markle that is a good idea. I am have to run it past my landlord.

All in all, Rico, it sounds like you handled it well and knew exactly what to do. And you proved you're human. You're just like most of us out there, trusting all our computer labors to whatever is the cheapest or most unlucky electrical component in some hard drive.

As of now my system is pooched.

The only way to get it back running normally is a complete system re-install. It is unusable in it's present state. It seems like it runs fine. Apps launch okay etc but after a few minutes of use I get beachballs trying to scroll web pages. PS CS3 will take forever to open files. Even the Finder starts beachballing. Seamonkey kept beachballing so I re-installed version 1.1.5 to put a fresh version on the system. It took over 5 minutes for the app to write from the disk image. It usually takes less than 20 seconds for this process to complete.

I might try to re apply the X.4.10 update before a complete re-install. At least I got new refrigerator out of it all.

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It's obviously all in your imagination, Rico. Steve Jobs assured us that OS X was rock-solid, and could never go down. Ipso facto, it can't be happening.
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