Amid A Computer Crisis, A MacBook To The Rescue

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 01, 2007

This is a true story that happened last month before I went on vacation. As you may remember, my primary working computer at the office has been a Dell Latitude D610 notebook running Windows XP, which BusinessWeek assigned to me the day I joined (which oddly enough was two years ago today). I’ve had a Black MacBook running alongside it, which I have been using primarily as a second machine. I wasn’t using the Mac as my main work machine because 1) I didn’t get it until only a few months ago and 2) all my working files were stored on the Dell and 3) Because I was mired in Microsoft Outlook for email, scheduling and so on. The MacBook, nice as it was to have, sat mostly neglected immediately to my left.

So one day about five weeks ago I come and see the Dell displaying the so called “Blue Screen of Death.” I wasn’t terribly alarmed because I had seen it before and generally had recovered after holding down the power key and restarting the machine. This time, however was different. The Dell didn’t come back to life.

It was going to be a long day, I sighed to myself, stirring my coffee. (More after the jump.)

With deadlines hovering over my head like gnats, and a dead computer making it unlikely they would be met, I called corporate IT – staffed by a helpful chap based in India. I rather forcefully said that my case needed immediate high priority attention by someone with on-site support. Thankfully, someone did appear at my desk within an hour or so.

He walked off with the Dell, leaving me thinking, for a few minutes, like I would be unable to work. Then it occurred to me that I had this Mac, all fired up and ready to log in to the corporate network. I’ve been using it to write for this blog, and to test Mac software, but had otherwise stuck with using the Dell for the bulk of my work by default. (Regular readers will know that all my personal computers are Macs, save for an eMachines notebook I bought in 2003 and no longer use.)

So I dive in my work with the MacBook. Later I head over to the Apple Store on Fifth Ave. and pickup a wireless keyboard. Rummaging around I find connector suitable for my Dell LCD screen giving me a two-screen set-up. I start humming along in Exchange, in Office for the Mac, and Safari (for some reason Firefox on the Mac is slow on our network….).

The next day, the IT guy comes back and says my hard drive is hosed and he’s going to erase it. “No way,” I say. Nearly two years’ worth of files are stored on that drive. Two years worth of email, notes, presentations, drafts of stories and columns and blog entries. No way can I approve of just erasing the hard drive and starting over. I demand, rather strenuously that the hard drive needs to be professional recovered.

The next day they remove the hard drive, place it an external enclosure, connect it to another machine and search its various directories. They find nothing, or at least nothing important, and the time between selecting a folder and the time that the folder actually responds is very very very long wait. It’s at this point I go to visit, and see for myself the results of their recovery efforts. I’m prepared, but not happy about the prospect of arguing to the boss that my drive needs to be sent to DriveSavers for what will likely be a very expensive recovery effort.

On a lark I ask them to let me take the drive and try it myself. First I do as they did, and connect it to another Windows machine (actually a Mac running Boot Camp). No dice.

Then I connect the drive to the MacBook. I start searching for particular files by name in Spotlight. At first I get a similar reaction as I had in Windows… a very slow response and no evidence that anything will appear.

At this point colleague Adam Aston, he of our new blog “Green Biz” happens by and we chat about something, I forget what, for about five minutes or so. I turn back to the screen, and find the file I had searched for in Spotlight has been found. Slowly but surely, the folders of the damaged hard drive are coming into focus.

I spend the next several hours grabbing everything I can find, and copying it to the MacBook’s desktop. By the time I’m done I have a folder called “SALVAGE” with 11.84 gigabytes of data out of about 15 or 16 gigabytes of stuff that I otherwise would have lost completely. It’s not everything, and in fact many files don’t copy over, including on .pst file containing an archive of email from Outlook. But most of what I had wanted to recover makes it over to the new machine.

I don’t know exactly why the Mac can see the files, whereas Windows machines cannot, but who am I to question a data-recovery miracle happening right before my eyes? (If you have any ideas, please enlighten me in the comments box below.)

The next day, the Dell comes back, with new hard drive, a fresh installation of Windows XP. It runs like new. And it now sits immediately to my left mostly neglected.

Now a month or more later, I still need the PC for a few things. I still use a Blackberry -- heavily -- and so I need a PC running Blackberry Desktop Redirector alongside Outlook (We don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server, sadly). I still occasionally run into Web sites that don’t like Macs or Safari or some combination thereof, and so the PC comes in handy then. And I’m going to have to use the PC in order to migrate my archived .pst email files first back up to the Exchange server and then to Entourage, where I can export them in .mbox format on the MacBook. But aside from those other things, I’m working almost 100% of the time on a Mac.

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