I lost roughly three hours today. I was copying some files from my old PowerMac (AKA: the Smurf) to my MacBook, when the connection suddenly dropped. Turns out the Smurf had a kernel panic. D’oh! “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll turn it off and on again, and then carry on where I left off.” But no.

Kernel panic on reboot. Every time. Even when trying to boot from a DiskWarrior DVD. Hmm.

Luckily, the Smurf has a backup drive in it. I managed to boot from that and see the panicking disc on the desktop. “Ah ha! Disk Utility should fix that now that I can see it!” But no.

Drive cannot be unmounted. WTF?

After several reboots and running fsck a few times, I could finally run Disk Utility and DiskWarrior on it. DU found nothing wrong (yeah, right), but DW found a ton of things to fix.

So, three hours wasted, none the wiser as to what suddenly caused the problem, but it’s all fixed now. It did, however, make me think about my brother’s old Power Mac G4 Cube which is boxed up at the parental mansion. It seems criminal to keep it out of site and unused, but it would need some work to be able to run Leopard on it.

Sonnet Encore ST G4/1.8 GHz G4 with 512KB L2 cache AGP

£309.75

RAM upgrade for Apple Power Mac G4 Cube

£137.97

8X “SuperDrive” Upgrade for Power Mac G4 Cube (the current combo drive is hosed)

£68.60

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 3.5” 7200RPM 120GB (the Cube can’t see anything over 128Gb)

£48.87

TOTAL

£565.19

Bloody hell… HOW MUCH? :O

That’s one to tackle when I’ve made my millions then, I guess. :S