A good clean out

Spent half of the morning selecting two wedding's worth of images for two Wedding Books and the latter half trying to copy them to the startup disk, which was throwing up errors and not completing! I initially thought this was a harddisk issue and thankfully the contents were backups - so to actually work on the disk was not a problem. I tried reformatting the disk several times with no positive result. I tried rebuilding the file structure through Disk Warrior - still no joy. So what does a frustrated Mac user do? Call Toby! He suggested that the case rather than the disk might be the problem and I have had LaCie drives "die" only to find it was the enclosures jumpers that had failed and that the actual drive was fine . . . With this all in mind I decided to pull the BIG Mac out of its dusty corner and test things. When I ran the suspect harddrive on its own all seemed fine but when joined back into the various daisychanied drives the problem reappeared.

It seemed logical to pull the whole lot out and rejig the cabling at least and see what that would do. As well as the above new issue, the main Firewire port on the rear of the BIG Mac seems dead - hence five drives, an iPod and an iSight camera were all plugged into each other - possibly too much going on? I needed extra Firewire ports and suddenly remembered that the old G4 was running a Firewire AGP board I received bundled with the Nikon Scanner bought years ago. Would it work with the G5? Only one way to find out! A quick but of internal surgery to remove the board and equally quick to install in the G5 and I was ready to test and unbelievably all works!!! With that success I enjoyed dusting out the BIG Mac's corner and tidying the spaghetti cables - what a mess! All back in and tidy and all seems happy. Now I have to reselect all the images that I had done this morning as all the data is copied back - all back to zero!