[Posted retroactively once the site was back. Originally emailed to family and friends. This post is timestamped with the email timestamp.]
Well, at just before 3 AM today finally got the clone drive for my website server finished. Complete and total copy of my server on an external firewire drive. It took many reboots between crashes to get there, but it was done! At the end of the cloning, I set it to boot from the external drive and reboot and… nothing.
A little research on the web later and it turns out that the ancient Beige G3 PowerMac I have predates the ability to boot from external firewire drives. Unlike Macs made in the last five years, it needs to already be booted to even see the drive. And worse, even though the
old drive had actually been up pretty consistently for at least the last 6 hours… it actually had stopped crashing… now the G3 was deathly confused and trying to start from a drive it couldn’t see, and for some reason was not failing back to the original drive. Just a
blank screen with the ancient Floppy disk with a question mark flashing on the screen indicating an old Mac with no System.
Urgh.
Anyway, chatted with Chris. The entirety of the content of abulsme.com is now being transfered slowly from Florida to Virginia, and we’ll try to get everything up and running there before too long. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the weekend. Dunno.
But at least there is no data loss. I have everything. I think. :-)
I also think I really need a Mac Mini.
That would solve the issue completely, plus several others.
But working on the zero dollar cost options first probably makes sense. :-)