Death of an HD - suggestions?

[barondave]

grump grump grump

For the first time, I had a working hard drive die on me. Perhaps I've been lucky, but I've never had a major issue with my drives, from the SCSI era on.

Until this week.

And, naturally, it's the most recent drive I bought. The terabyte drive I got last year because it was cool to have a terabyte drive, and they got cheap enough.

Fortunately, nothing was completely lost. I got it to put all my CDs into iTunes, and I still have the CDs. (Though some large number of them are not in CDDB and I had to hand-input the info.) I have very few mp3s/downloads that aren't stored anywhere else, and all the important files (such as podcasts) are in other places as well.

Also, I was using for backup; it was my Time Travel repository. I've lost the backups and the history, but everything's working. My original is my backup to the backup.

On the other hand, setting up iTunes again will be a pain. I had thousands of songs, many of them with ratings and comments. Many playlists and categories. And it means I can't plug in my iPod or do interviews, since the data will just erase. (I can eventually download my iPod songs into iTunes...)

My fingers are still crossed that I can recover the data. If it were important, I could. But it would probably cost more than the original prices of the drive and of the replacement. I may just eat the time and play with all my CDs again.

I'm more-or-less resigned to replacement and the work, but I LJ has a lot of techies. Suggestions of something to try? I've used Disk Utility and TechTool 5, and the thing doesn't even show up in the listings.

grump grump grump

Comments

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

No suggestions on the HD if you can't get it to show in Disk Utility.

But for getting your songs from the iPod onto your computer, there's a shareware program out there called Senuti (iTunes spelled backwards...) that can reverse the usual flow and allow you to dump songs off an iPod and onto the computer. That might save you some of your trouble, depending on how much of your collection is on that iPod.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

None of the songs on the iPod are irreplaceable. What I'd have to do is remake all the aacs and figure out which songs I had deleted after listening once or twice. I think I can do that fairly easily with a "use iPod as disk" preference, or something.

Most of the songs in iTunes are in several formats. If I reloaded all the songs, I'd lose that part of it (plus any editing I did).

I suspect the big loser will be Marscon, since my playlists and even some Shockwave CDs were fully loaded. I'd have to recreate them, or use Toast, or something else.

It's been four years; almost time to think about getting a new computer... but that would require income...