back from the dead

A few days ago, Fort Collins got nailed by a seeming monsoon. I had the misfortune of bike commuting home from the time the rain started, continuing into the time the rain converted into hail, and finishing my commute as the storm finally petered out. It wasn’t terribly bad, except for a minor freakout during the extreme flash-BOOM!s exploding overhead as I stupidly rode underneath the very exposed Powerline Trail. That was scary.

Worse, though, was my wide open window near my computer desk at home. Where my computer sits. With an open, exposed chassis.

I walked in and saw the Mac mini pulsating sadly and making sick noises. Sigh. Unplug it, and turn it upside-down and the inch of standing water in the case poured onto my desk. As a computer professional, I happen to know that dumping out that much water is probably a Bad Thing^TM.

Let’s check my other system downstairs, to see the last time I did a backup of the Mac. February? Crap.

Stuff dries out kinda quick in Colorado, but I gave it an extra day or two before plugging everything back in. The external hard drive that I boot off of is having a really hard time spinning back up and I make a frowny face. On a whim, I decide to see if I can reinstall to the mini’s internal drive. Minor success for our hero.

Ok, so booting back up on the internal drive… woop woop, I can see the external drive again! Disk Repair finds some bad beeble-bops and fixes them up, so I think I’m set. Attempt a reboot and…. uh oh. Sad pulsating light, sick drive noises, and a frowny face from me again.

Boot back to internal drive, reconnect external drive and all is well. Buh? Run Disk Repair again and notice something very odd — it’s telling me that it’s connected via USB2.0, but I told the external drive to prefer firewire (both ports are hooked up). Now that’s a little weird.

Let’s think about this… Ok, theory formed, time to experiment.

Reboot with only firewire hooked up. Frowny faces all around. Reboot again with only USB hooked up. Happy face. Reboot one last time with both hooked up. Frown and gnash teeth.

Conclusion: the rain fried the firewire chip either on my mac or on the external enclosure. Most likely the enclosure. This kinda sucks because you can only boot off an external firewire drive, can’t boot off external USB. On the plus side, I have all my data back… which is nice and only minorly inconvenient.

Lesson learned. Computron moved away from window. Backup scripts dusted off and added to cron. Burn incense peace offering to the computer gods. Disaster averted.