DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last week I spent a couple late nights finishing up some cleanup editing on my drum tracks for Michael Capella. I was doing the final export of the final song — literally, I was 20 minutes from being 100%, completely done with the project.

The export failed. The message from Pro Tools was, “bounce handler could not keep up.” This happens occasionally, if some background process steals too many CPU or i/o cycles from Pro Tools. The fix is as easy as increasing the buffer size or disabling networking or quitting any other app that might be running.

The second attempt hung. This never happens. Pro Tools is just about the most stable application I use. Hanging is a bad sign. I couldn’t force-quit, either, a worse sign. When I rebooted and the export hung a second time and I again couldn’t force-quit and had to reboot, it was a worst sign. What’s worse than worst? Super-worst? Überworst? Liverwurst?

My recording rig is an old Powerbook. All audio files live on an external Firewire drive, which now appeared to be having “issues,” a euphamism I occasionally employ just before tearing a piece of recalcitrant computer hardware from its mounts and drop-kicking it off the balcony into the creek. I recalled, during the second reboot, that this device had originally been the boot drive in a refurbished G4 tower, and therefore had seen untold levels of abuse at the hands of uncounted previous owner(s). Not good, or maybe less than that.

The drive mounted. I immediately began copying the key audio files to my Powerbook’s internal drive. This failed too. Oh, really not good, or definitely less than that.

I actually had backups. At most, I’d lost a couple hours’ editing work. I wasn’t at risk for having to re-record anything. But hardware problems get under my skin.

Then it hit me — maybe the problem wasn’t in reading the external audio drive, but writing to the laptop’s internal drive. To find out, I attached the external drive to my workstation. It mounted fine. I copied all the important stuff to my workstation’s RAID, and burned a DVD of all my current music projects, while holding my breath.

Some time later I regained consciousness to the happy ‘bing!’ sound that means disk verification completed successfully. So, my audio drive was fine… it was my laptop drive that was dying.

Fortunately, my laptop contains little data that can’t be restored or recreated easily. But I tried to recover it anyway, by booting from CD and repairing the directory, always a sane first course of action. The repair failed with a disheartening message like “optimization failed due to device corruption,” which I read to the sonic accompaniment of a quiet repetitive clicking sound that, in my experience, invariably means “your disk drive is well and truly fsck’d.”

You’ve started your backups, right?

My story ended happily. I cabled the powerbook to my workstation via Firewire, booted it into “target disk mode,” and successfully repaired the disk with no apparent data loss. It tests clean; the S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis passes. I can’t explain it, but I’m not complaining.

I’d be wise to replace it, and I probably will, even though that will contribute yet-another questionable piece of storage hardware to the boneyard.