I spent a portion of my tax return this year on a much needed series of technology upgrades.  No, I’m not getting a new computer, but I did buy two shiny new hard drives!

STAGE 1 – Desktop Swap

The first stage of my project was to swap the cases for my personal desktop and the Minecraft server.  The Dell case I’d been using as my gaming desktop was originally purchased to be the Minecraft server, as it had a nice 8-core i7.  Minecraft ran like a dream on it, but I had to re-purpose it as my main desktop when my old iMac started to die (more on the iMac below).

I got a new 1 TB SSD to use and moved my desktop into the HP case I had been using for Minecraft.  I don’t notice any real changes, everything seems to run about the same or slightly better. I went from a 2nd Gen i7 to a 3rd Gen i5.  Everything I researched online said this was a decent move.

Minecraft is so happy to be back in the Dell case!  Spawn rates at farms are better, lag is down, the world loads smoother, its just all around great!!

STAGE 2 – Plex Upgrade

This was the most important part of my purchases.  Plex has been struggling for space for a few months now, and needed a new HD.  I ran into some annoying issues with the copying process though.

I figured I could just pop the new HD in my server along with the old one and its SSD boot drive. Well, I was horribly wrong. I hadn’t been in there for some time, and forgot that it only has 2 bloody SATA power plugs. No possible way to plug in 3 drives at once.  I got creative.  I removed the boot disk, and plugged in the 5 and 12 TB drives. I then booted to PMagic and spent 10 hours copying data from one drive to the other.

I got the new drive installed and had to redo most of Plex to point at the new location.  Things are running GREAT!  I had to spend an annoying amount of time fixing the download VirtualBox as it didn’t like me moving directories around.

STAGE 3 – Restore Video Cold Storage

This is where I ran into the worst problems, and sadly they are still on-going.  My old iMac, Anubis, has an old 2 TB drive that I’ve been using as “video cold storage” for some time now. It had nearly a terabyte of old tv shows on it, including over 220 GB of Classic Doctor Who.

Well, I hooked her up with the intent of copying the data off and discovered she no longer boots.  She’s dead Jim.  I’ve spent the last two days going through every possible thing I can think of to repair the HD and access the files.

• Attempted safe-mode boot = FAILED
• Attempted boot to recovery partition = FAILED
• Created boot thumb drive to run first aid = FAILED
• Pulled the HD and attempted to run first aid using my MacBook Pro = FAILED
• Running Recovery software = currently running, but not looking promising

From what I can see, the HD has just lost its partition table.  It had 2 partitions on it, but it looks like its just un-allocated space. I’m trying everything to recover the partition, but nothing seems promising yet 🙁 The picture on this post is of the current setup trying to recover the data.

I’m afraid I’ve lost all the goodies I was storing there.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, this HD is about a decade old.  And there is a silver lining, Anubis is going to inherit the old 128 GB SSD that I replaced in my main desktop!