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iceman
31-03-2010, 04:38 PM
It's been a frustrating week and a half!

On the Saturday about 1.5 weeks ago, I captured my first light data using my PST and DMK21AU04. There were some nice proms, filaments and active regions and I was looking forward to processing my first solar data.

I was lazy that day, and captured direct to the Macbook hard-drive instead of the external USB hard-drive like I normally do.

Well later that afternoon my Macbook started dying. The hard-drive failed and I couldn't boot up into Windows at all. I was able to boot up into Mac intermittently but couldn't access most of the data without it timing out.

Eventually I was able to boot up on an Ubuntu linux boot disc, and access the WinXP drive to copy my very important work and personal data off the hard drive onto a USB stick.

Over the course of a week, I was able to recover pretty much all of my work data, and most of my personal data. Some files were lost through being corrupted, some images and some of my iTunes music files. While annoying, it was a much better result than I initially thought I'd end up with. I thought I was going to lose it all!!

However, the directory that contained my solar PST data was completely corrupted and I wasn't able to recover ANY of the data out of the 7 avi's I captured that day.

Very frustrating!

After being on a Dell for the last week and a half, I'm now on my replacement Macbook Pro. It took a week to recover the data, and only a few hours yesterday to copy it all onto my new machine :)

So anyway, now i'm back to square one waiting to capture my first light PST data, with a week of rain and clouds scheduled! :help:

rat156
31-03-2010, 05:00 PM
That's annoying Mike.

What brand of hard drive was it?

I have had trouble with large Seagate drives before, but I think HDD failure is going to become more and more common with the huge capacities that we have now.

Get an external FW800 HDD (or better an array, such as a Drobo, I have a 16Tb Drobo attached to my desktop at home) and use time machine for your new Mac. You shouldn't lose anything that way.

Cheers
Stuart

bird
31-03-2010, 05:05 PM
Mike, I can feel for you... I've had similar problems in the past.

Right now I'm using a usb3 external drive, and it's finally fast enough that I can capture direct to it (better than usb2 or firewire-400 which were my other options).

So you could consider getting a usb3 card for your mac when they come out and trying that as well.

cheers, Bird

sheeny
31-03-2010, 05:21 PM
I know that feeling all too well.

Looking forward to your first sunnage!

Al.

h0ughy
01-04-2010, 02:48 PM
sad news indeed I hope your first light is good for the second time. You must be getting used to that mac! best wishes loading everything back up to speed.

PS- i rebuilt an older PC getting all the software loaded, licencing paid for and then the whole lot died on me (happend to me two weeks ago with the observatory PC) - motherboard, processor and memory - salvaged the video card. trouble was i had a Raid array setup i have 5 disks in the machine - c drive and raid 5 storage on the other 4. Ok overkill for a PC for the observatory but it was only to be used for guiding and data capture. Might try to rebuild another PC... XP pro doesnt like all new hardware for some reason ;)

RB
01-04-2010, 04:23 PM
Doh !!
Sorry to hear Mike.
Maybe ditch the old OS and migrate to Solaris for all your PST work. :question: :P

Allan_L
06-04-2010, 01:04 PM
Hmmm!
May be a sign from the gods, for snitching my PST !

Matt Wastell
07-04-2010, 08:25 PM
Bugger!