Cau Dy Geg

So, something is wreaking havoc on the stability of my OSX 10.6 installation, causing filesystem corruption, even though its a journaled filesystem. So, whilst I track down the culprit (leaning toward the Seagate Momentus 500Gb drive at the mo!), a few reminders of useful bits and pieces …

• A USB recovery “disk”, via Disk Utility, insert your 10.6 install media, then restore 10.6 installation disk to a USB stick (8Gb+) for a smoother ride

• Oh, I wish AppleJack had been ported to Snow Leopard, most of its functionality works though and apparently a new version is but days away.

• The old faithful …

  fsck_hfs -ypr /dev/disk1s2
  

  Managed to bring back a disk structure (after 5 passes!) that Disk Utility had all but written off with a cursory “Wipe and re-install” response.

• Tracking drives back to BSD id’s is much easier using:

  diskutil list
  -or-
  disktool -l
  

• Obviously, the above is made less life threatening by:

  1. Daily SuperDuper/CCC clones of the drive, (SD is my personal favourite for its quick update)

  2. Time Machine backups made nightly at 2am when they are non-disruptive, but invaluable (see TimeMachineEditor for a great tool to help with this)

  3. Dropbox maintaining more and more of my daily grind (50Gb) in its offsite cache and keeping it transparently sync’ed to my other machines.

  4. Gmail filtering my mail for the domain means that it all IMAP accessible and hence only copied to my machine.

So, hopefully I’ll eliminate the issues and if it turns out to be the Seagate Momentus, probably return that for RMA, but after many years of good luck with hard drives, this will be the 2nd Momentus 500Gb that has been in this system and failed — never had any issues with the earlier 200Gb and 320Gb models …