The affected drives — model numbers ST96812AS and ST98823AS — are commonly found in notebooks such as Apple’s MacBook or MacBook Pro, the firm says. To determine whether a MacBook has one of the affected drives, it’s suggested that owners go to their Mac’s System Profiler application and check the revision number under the Serial ATA listing.
If the System Profiler indicates that the computer is using a Seagate hard drive with firmware Version 7.01, Retrodata recommends backing up all data and then having the drive replaced.
I can’t say whether my old hard drive was one of those listed; it’s on its way back to the Apple factory (required under my AppleCare warranty). But the symptoms are familiar:
As part of its continued coverage of the vulnerability, Retrodata this week said it continues to receive “quantities” of the affects drives for recovery, nearly all of which display the same cause of failure — the read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable.
That would probably explain the clicking sounds the drive made while running.
Sure would have been nice to have this information three weeks ago. The new hard drive is nice, but maybe Apple can give me back those videos of my grandparents. Time to go back stuff up.
I got an email from the guys at China Law Blog this morning begging—OK, asking politely, but begging on their own site—for an endorsement on ABA’s best blawg contest. CLB being one of my favorite China blogs, how could I not?
What sway I have in such things is questionable, but if both my readers vote for CLB, well, I’m sure it will make Dan and Steve happy. And we all want happy lawyers, right? Better than unhappy lawyers (though now that I think about it, which group is more likely to sue?).
CLB was in second place this morning and coming up fast on Patently-O, but as of this writing, appears to have taken the lead. Voting runs until Jan. 2, so it’s still anyone’s game.
I think Imagethief said it best: Vote for CLB and get some lawyer karma. Given my luck lately, I’ll take all the karma I can get.
My hard drive suffered a fatal melt down last week. I woke up on Friday morning to find my screen holding fast at 1:18 a.m. and my 6:30 a.m. alarm telling me it was time for class. The laptop’s fan was almost as loud. I shut down, restarted, nothing. A gray screen, a file folder with a blinking question mark. My computer was checking its own vitals, looking up at me and reporting, “We aren’t detecting any brainwaves. The patient is not responding.”
Attempts to revive the disc failed. Neither a laptop nor an external port could recognize the bits of metal that used to contain 60 gigabytes of my personal data. A technician at the only Mac repair shop in town left the drive in his freezer overnight in a last effort. No good.
And, before you ask, I did not have a good set of backups. I was sorting photos to move them onto other formats when this happened. It was the equivalent of my virtual house burning down. Among the lost items: 20 gb of photos, including those from a trip through California, my first year in China, last January in Korea, my trip through Southeast Asia in February; videos of the same trips, video interviews for a project I never really got going on why people come to China; an interview with my grandparents, recorded just before I left for China.
That last one just plain hurts.
Two bright spots:
I bought an AppleCare plan with the computer, which was probably the smartest thing I did last year. No cost for service, even in China.
Over the past year, I’ve posted, blogged, emailed or otherwise shared a great many of my photos, videos and documents. Those are still in email accounts and online, so I’m mining those databases bit by bit to recover what I can.
This whole mess has in some ways reconfirmed that I need to be more disciplined about posting. Backups are great, but those fail, too, as another friend found out this week when his portable hard drive fell off his desk. The safest place to put data is many places.
Fithi Garza decided to tattoo his late brother’s name in Chinese on his arm. He did it in a back room in Dalian’s Nepalese Bar. There is, by my estimation, exactly one advantage to getting inked in the back of a Chinese laowai bar: the characters will probably be right.
Production notes: This was all done on my Canon point and shoot, as usual, and I’m pretty satisfied with the sound quality. Note to self: Get all primary interviews done before the subject’s friends show up with beer. Editing went faster this time. I think I’m getting the hang of this.
