So after roughly 72 hours of running, DiskWarrior finally finished with the disk! Now I have selected all the files it was able to recover, and in the left hand side of the screen chose the external USB hard drive I bought for this purpose, and am copying over all of the data it’s able to now.
Hey folks – Chris the owner here.
My Fiance’s iMac decided that it wanted to stop working this weekend. Now, keep in mind, I am primarily a Windows/PC technician, but I am not your typical “Everybody should own a PC and not a Mac” type person. There are people who like Macs, and people who like PCs, and there are pluses and minuses to both. That being said, we have had this particular iMac for 3 years almost. It was a Christmas gift for her. On December 26th, the original hard drive died. So, we brought it to the store, and eventually after much discussion and debate, they discovered that yes, a hard drive making a clicking noise and not booting up was in fact a dead hard drive. So they replaced it.
Now, here we are less than 3 years later, and her computer starts going incredibly slow, and refusing to open Adobe Illustrator. She is a graphic designer, so aside from a web browser, this is the most important thing on her PC. I initially thought some Adobe update broke it, as their updates frequently refuse to install (on both PCs and Macs). So, as I’m looking at it, I notice things like, oh, I don’t know, a 10 minute wait time to open the web browser, etc.
Long story short, I did some digging, and a program called OnyX which is a maintenance type piece of software (you can get it free from download.com) says I need to boot from the OSX install disk and run the disk utility. (Hint: You can go to Apple menu->System Preferences->Startup Disk after inserting the CD to do this, or you can power the computer off, back on, and hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard after you here the “BONG!”) Guess what? Disk utility says there’s a problem that it can’t fix. So I go through some more hoops, do some googling, and decide to go to the local Apple Store for help picking out a drive utility. I have to be honest – the Apple Store on a Saturday afternoon is not where you want to be. To say it’s busy is an understatement. So, I asked one of the salespeople which disk utility would work best, and asked if they could go ask one of the “Geniuses”. (I know, I laugh every time too) So, the sales rep honestly tells me this, that they are too busy, but if I go online I could read reviews of which software would work best. This was extremely helpful – apparently there is this thing called the Internet! Oh well – at least he didn’t say “All we have is what’s out there”. But I digress. So, after seeing other people online with the same sort of issue as me, some sort of Invalid Node error, everyone kept mentioning DiskWarrior. So, rather than spend my hard earned money at the Apple Store, which its true, all they have is what’s out there, I bought it direct from the manufacturer for $99.
The nice thing about DiskWarrior, from a PC tech point of view, is that the disk is bootable. So basically, same routine, put the disk in (after getting the OSX disk to eject, which involved holding down the Eject/Load button on the keyboard for an inordinate amount of time – Mac doesn’t trust you with a physical eject button because it might be too complicated for you to understand!) hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard until it gives you the twirling circle deal under the Apple logo, and you’re in.
It then scans your disk for problems and attempts to rebuild broken directories. If you have a simple problem, I’m told this process runs in about 30-60 minutes. Being that my drive is physically malfunctioning, I’m currently at 48 hours and counting. It says underneath the progress bar “diskwarrior speed reduced by disk malfunction”. After some more googling, and checking DiskWarrior’s website, this can take 1-4 days, and ask long as you can still move the mouse, it’s still allegedly recovering data. I am told that once this process completes, we will be able to copy recovered data elsewhere. I purchased a 500 GB external hard drive for the very reasonable price of $69.00 from Costco – it’s made by Seagate.
Stay tuned – when it finishes, I will post a continuation of this article on recovering the data. I will also be replacing the 250 GB hard drive in it with a new 500 GB sata drive – so you will all get to see what the guts of an iMac look like.
We’ve been seeing a spike in the number of virus and spyware infections on computers recently, and wanted to discuss this a bit.
One that we have seen a lot of lately is “Personal Antivirus 2009″. It is removable. It is also difficult, relatively speaking, to remove.
So how did you get it? Well, mainly people get it by clicking on bogus popup ads that look like windows error messages. What makes this program more sinister is it is a full fledged application designed to look like many common pieces of antivirus and antispyware software. It comes up with popup messages constantly saying things like “Detected 209 viruses” and various phony viruses it has detected on your computer.
While I have yet to find one product that cures absolutely everything, I have found a few good tricks that you can use to keep your computer in top shape.
You should be running some type of commercial virus scanning software, and some type of spyware/adware scanner and remover.
I will list a few products that I like, as well as some that I dislike, and why. Many people are not big fans of antivirus software because it can interfere with your normal use, which I certainly understand. However, you can’t just go without antivirus software on your computer just because it slows it down a little bit. Every piece of software that stays running all the time on your computer will slow it down a bit, so you have to pick and choose.
I like the corporate versions of Norton Antivirus, like Norton Client Security. I use this at my corporate clients, but for home users its cost prohibitive. What I like about it is that as antivirus software goes, it is reasonably quick… with one exception being that if you schedule regular scans, and your end users computer happens to be off at the time, it will run as soon as they boot up their PC. Generally, at 9:00 am Monday morning when they are already late, and trying to get their day/week started. But back to what I like – the server where you put the admin piece downloads the LiveUpdate virus definitions for you regularly, and makes the client PCs install them. You can monitor errors and who is and isn’t in compliance. It is also tough for an end user to disable, which is what you want.
I like Spyware Doctor free edition, which you can usually get from download.com, but from time to time its only available as a free trial package. That’s the part I don’t like. Also, on my corporate clients, sometimes it doesn’t get along with Symantec Client Security, and it will constantly have a little play button icon saying “Starting Spyware Doctor” and generally slowing things down. Generally removing and reinstalling it seems to fix this. Spyware Doctor gets quite a bit of the stuff I see, although it sounds an air raid siren type alert saying you have dozens of threats, when most of the time it’s just ad cookies from regular sites that are coming up.
I like Malware Bytes Antimalware – you can get it from Malwarebytes.org. In fairness, I am an affiliate, so if you buy that product, I get a small token sum for that. But in my defense, I discovered this product BEFORE becoming an affiliate. You can use the free version for both scanning AND removal, which is why I like it. The full version adds realtime protection and some other neat features.
This isn’t going to be a full tutorial. If you’re here, and downloading the above products to remove viruses and spyware that already exist, I’m making the assumption that you know what you’re doing and what buttons to click. If you are here because your computer is infected, and you have no idea how to do this kind of thing, your best bet is to give us, or any computer service shop that you trust, a call. When my refrigerator breaks, I call an appliance repair place. I can unjam the icemaker, but if it stops cooling, I know I’m in over my head.
If, however, you are here because your computer ISN’T having any problems to speak of, good for you – your best bet is to put an Antivirus and Antispyware program on your PC to keep it that way.
I severely dislike Norton 360, Norton Internet Security, and products like it. They are bloated, slow your system down extremely, often don’t uninstall cleanly, and block things you don’t want blocked. 9 times out of 10 that I get a home user that can’t see other computers on their own network, its because they’ve installed one or more of these types of products. And yes, even after clicking the buttons to allow firewall exceptions, etc. They are garbage, they don’t work properly, and I hate them. I know that’s not exactly a technical overview, but if you have me work on your PC, the first thing I’m going to do when I see that is install something that works, and uninstall those.
I hope you found this article helpful! As always, please contact us with specific questions or if you need immediate help with your computers.
One of our customers had been having issues with their Exchange Server 2003 Standard. The symptom was that their server would stop sending or receiving messages. After restarting the services, it happened again a day later. Looking in the log files, the database for exchange had hit its limit of 18GB. This was very unexpected, as they only had 3 users on their network. There are two ways to fix this. One way is simply to increase the storage limit:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912375
The other way, which we chose, was to archive the user’s mailbox causing the issue.
In Outlook, choose File->Archive, and follow your nose. If you are not comfortable doing either of these methods yourself, feel free to contact us and we’ll either help you out, or help you find someone in your local area who can.