Last week, the boot drive on my PowerMac (an old, 450Mhz G4 DP) finally decided that it’s time was up. Not bad considering the machine is something like 5 years old; But still, losing a drive isn’t a good thing if you’re not one to make regular backups.
The first symptom I noticed was that the machine was starting to use the “spinning beach ball” much more then normal and I was seeing some unusual delays working with local files. Thankfully, SMARTReporter quickly alerted me to the problem — the drive was dying. I started running SMARTReporter on both my machines a few months back. For awhile it seemed a little silly having a menu-bar icon for something that was unlikely to be a problem for many years. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t change my mind about the importance of such a utility. I’m also a little surprised that OS X doesn’t notify about S.M.A.R.T. warnings unless you fire up Disk Utility. It seems like an easy enough thing for the OS to monitor, but I guess it isn’t a big deal as long as there are free utilities to do it.
Of course, knowing that a drive is failing is only useful if you’re prepared to do something about it. Thankfully I had another old drive in the parts bin, which I dropped into a Firewire enclosure and mounted. Backing up the home directories was priority number one, so I used Apple’s ditto command to mirror them. (Note: ditto is a command-line tool that ships with OS X. See man ditto for more.) With the home directories safe, I put the machine to sleep to buy some time while I picked up a new drive.
With a replacement drive in-hand, I dropped it into the Firewire case, mounted it, initialized it with Disk Utility, and fired up Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). CCC is a disk mirroring utility that can create a bootable drive. There were a few errors along the way, but CCC was able to mirror the old boot drive onto the new one. With the cloning complete, I opened the case, swapped the old drive for the new, and rebooted. Presto! A few apps (like Quicksilver) were upset with the change, but for the most part, everything works just fine on the cloned system. And to top it off, since finding 30 GB drives isn’t easy anymore, I now have *much* more space on the boot drive!