good lord, i’m tired…

i was at Linda’s house til past 11pm last night trying to restore her power mac g3 to working condition. i’m almost amazed that i was able to do it. it’s not often that you’re able to restore a hard drive to working order. i arrived at her house in edgefield just after 5pm. when i got there, she was obviously distraught. it seems like melt-downs like this always occur when you’re working hardest to meet a deadline. anyways, i tried booting up the mac. no dice. blinking folder icon. crap. diagnosis: something’s wrong with the system folder. next, i tried booting from the system disk. extension conflicts. double crap. what’s going on? at that point, i was a little perturbed, to say the least. i then tried to boot up from norton utilities. good lord, it worked. comp was booting up from that disk. comp fully boots up. i can see the hard drive Papa GIG (which has the system software on it.) good… the disk doesn’t appear to be damaged. i didn’t think the disk would appear at all if something major were wrong with. linda and i went through and checked to see if anything needed to be saved off of it. nope. good deal. i ran some tests on the drive with norton. found major errors. not surprising. fix the probs it found. then proceeded to zero the hard drive.

things were progressing well. installed os 9 onto the drive. i booted the hard drive on its own. yay!! it wasn’t completely screwed! i loaded the scsi drivers into the system folders in order to access Linda’s prized baby gig, momma gig and jarod hard drives. yay! they were still there, untouched. i loaded all of her old programs onto the reformatted hard drive (papa gig) and after a total of six hours i had the whole thing up and running again. i have to admit, it looked bleak when i first got there. i wasn’t sure if i’d be able to get it online again, but lo and behold i fixed it. the system still has some kinks in it because we weren’t able to test everything within the six hour period… but it is usable once again.

it is quite nice to be able to breathe life into a machine that seems like its teetering towards death’s door. hopefully it will behave itself for a good while.