Tragedy struck yesterday... I was in the process of migrating my photos and projects and things from my old Power Mac G5 to my new MacBook Pro. Moving my 17 GB of pictures between the machines over wifi was going to take 8 hours, but I found that if I copied them from the G5 to my iPod, and then from the iPod to the MacBook, the process only took 90 minutes. So I blew away all the music and videos on my iPod (they were all on the G5) and copied the pictures. Then I did the same with my iMovie projects. My documents were small enough to copy over the network.
My G5 has two 250 GB hard drives (yep, that's a half terabyte, baby!). I wanted to reinstall my operating system on the main system hard drive because it's just that time again. Mac OS X needs a reinstall every 2 - 3 years when used by a power user such as myself. Compare that to every 4 - 6 months I had to reinstall Windows before I saw the light. I double and triple checked that I had everything that I wanted from the primary hard drive (that's like a "C drive" to you heathens).
My secondary hard drive (HD2) was completely full of software, movie, and music downloads. I had a few dvd images and my 80 GB music collection. Yes, that's two solid months of non-stop music. I had every episode of House ever broadcast, including three new ones that I hadn't seen yet. I had two full seasons of 24. Three seasons of Family Guy. One season of The Simpsons. One season of The Office (US). Every episode of Prison Break. A dozen or so feature-length films. Anyway...you can see how my quarter terabyte was full.
I couldn't find my OS boot disc, but luckily I had a copy of the image on HD2. (The one that came with my MacBook gave a kernel panic "WTF is PPC?" message when I tried to boot from it.) So I burned the boot disc to a DVD and rebooted.
In the OS install, I chose to erase my hard drive and install the OS. I realized one second after I hit the "Yes, really erase" button that I had selected HD2 instead of my primary disc for erasure. I hit cancel, but it was too late. I canceled the install and rebooted. My entire music library was gone. Every last nibble of it. 0 kb used, 250 GB available.
When I told Marga, her first question was, "Did you lose any pictures!?" I smiled, because this confirms what they say about photo albums being the most important objects that people try to save in fires and other domestic disasters. I agree that losing my pictures would be much more of a disaster than losing my music, half of which I still have in dusty untouched-in-years CDs.
My MacBook only has a 120 GB hard drive, and I had been pondering how I was going to play my music on it. That problem's solved now. :-) Of course, I know I'm just synthesizing happiness. But at least I know that's just as good as real happiness, right?
I canÂ’t remember if I cried When I read about his widowed bride, But something touched me deep inside The day the music died.