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Panther Part 1. The Installation Nightmare
Yes I did the deed and upgraded my G4 1GHz Powerbook from OSX 10.2.8 to the new 10.3 (aka Panther). This page is the result of the extreme pain, suffering and massive data loss that resulted. So be warned expect some rants, but no bad language.
OK so its finally been released, and after hearing nothing but good things from a number of friends who had been testing the various beta releases, I decided to go for it, and ordered a upgrade from the Apple Store.
Anyway it arrived the Monday following the official release, which for a change was actually good timing, as I had a more or less meeting free day. A real case of "Today is a good day to upgrade", so time to see just how good it is.
First thing to do was a full backup of my Powerbooks 60GB disk, which as always went straight onto one of my LaCie 250GB Firewire 800 drives without any issues. (At the time I had 6 of these drives)
After 18 years in the IT business, I am totally on the excessive side of paranoid, so dismounted and unplugged all but one of the Firewire drives, which contained the backup. Well I figured it would be needed to restore my data after the install finished.
Now comes the installation, which just as expected with anything from Apple was about as idiot proof as it gets and went without any problems, er well, until it restarted that is, then I was presented with the ominous
volume read error, this "scared the crap out of me" given that the only disk that was hooked up was my only backup, plus held some 80 hours of digital video which was due for delivery in a few days.
My first thoughts where that Apple had done something to the Firewire driver, and it was either broken or just taking far too long to start, so in desperation/panic I reinstalled OSX 10.2.6, and restarted. nope, same error. Now getting more than a little worried, time to look into what actually happened to the disk and my valuable data it contained.
A quick analysis of the disk showed that the partition type had changed from HFS+ to UFS, which was a little odd, especially as the installation destination was set to the internal 60GB, not the 250GB Firewire drive.
Far worse than that, the partition table was in real trouble, and seemed to be suffering from some nasty corruption. Data recovery time...
It was a nice thought, but a total disaster, with my usual recovery tool, Data Rescue X 10.3 being unable to recover anything usable, every file it pulled from the disk, was corrupted in some way. This may sound less than wonderful, but its actually a much better result than any of the other tools I looked at could manage, in-fact none of them could even read the disk.
The end result of this mess, I lost 212GB of data, including all 80 hours of client video, several other commercial projects, my mail/life for several months, plus the total rewrite of this site (remember this drive was used for backups). This data loss in turn cost me a fair sized video project, and its associated income, after the client terminated the project. Some other clients, thankfully where a little more understanding, the final damage report ended up as 3 canceled projects, plus a horrible financial loss.
In short, thanks Apple for nothing....
What I suspect happened is Panther for some unknown reason changed the partition type to UFS, then on restarting fsck saw this and tried to fix it, which totally destroyed the data.
The really strange thing is that I have not been able to exactly recreate this same issue in any of the many tests since. Now while I could not recreate the partition type change, every one of my tests did prove that on restarting the machine any attached Firewire drives lost their partition tables. If thats not strange enough, this problem only happened on a restart and never from a shutdown.
I passed this and several other findings onto; Apple, LaCie, macfixit.com and several Mac using friends.
Before I get more emails, if I had not had the backup drive plugged in during the installation, it would have not done me any good. As the disk would have been trashed the first time the Powerbook restarted. Actually the damage could have been much worse, just think about it, I could have had all six of the 250GB drives trashed in-place of just the one I lost.
Closing Words
This was the bad news, but as hard as its going to be to believe, its not the end of my use of OSX or Panther on any of my systems, in-fact I do have lots more comments on it, and no, not all bad. For more read 'Panther Part2. The Aftermath'
Update: LaCie has released a firmware patch for their drives, which does (in my case anyway) fix this issue. Just be careful as I have unconfirmed reports of drives being unreadable after having this patch applied. Get it here
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