Not quite the honeymoon I envisioned

I arrived to my desk Friday morning following the studio recording of Buzz Out Loud to find a huge box blocking my seat. The Mac Pro I had ordered a mere two days prior was delivered, waiting to distract me from my day's duties. On top of that I had a dentist appointment late in the day across town, so I had plenty to keep me from going home right then and starting to tinker with it.

I was very anxious to get this bad boy home and start the long process of data swapping from my old G4, and re-installation of the software I use the most. Perhaps a little bit too anxious.

I popped open both machines to start doing the transfer of drives. The drives are so easy to install in to the Mac Pro. You simply screw the drives onto a platter (four screws) and then the platter slides into the side of the machine. No power or data cord to hook up manually. It's done automatically as you slide the platter in it's home. Awesome!

When I went to turn on the Mac Pro, I was greeted with dead silence, followed by the internal fan turning on so loudly, my wife could hear it form the other room in the house. I was perplexed. Then I smelled the burning. ACK! Power off. Did I just get a rotten Apple?

With the help of Allen099 on Plurk (oh and BTW, Plurk FTW cause this dialogue was a lifesaver for me!), I began to investigate the problem. I removed all drives and the Mac Pro powered up as expected. Well THAT'S good! I then dropped each drive in individually. The computer started the boot up process with all but one of the drives. I examined the drive only to see that one of the connection points was twisted, touching another point on the connection. I fixed that and threw the drive into the Mac Pro again. Boot up success!!!!

...except, now that I let the Mac Pro boot up to the desktop, I noticed that not one of those fancy drives actually mounted.

QUEUE "Jason is just smart enough to get himself into trouble" music.

When I took the drives out this time, I noticed that they all had twisted connection points in exactly the same areas (though none of them were touching other connections as they had in the drive above, so there was no shorting out occurring as a result.) This made me ask the question I SHOULD HAVE asked before I started installing the drives in the Mac Pro in the first place. Do these machines use the same type of hard drive?

See, the G4 takes an ATA drive... in my case, I have Ultra ATA drives. I've discovered in the past that ATA drives are backwards compatible with other types of ATA drives. The Mac Pro uses the new standard, Serial ATA (or SATA). Having never put my hands on a SATA drive, I never saw the difference in connectors. I just assumed that SATA was like all other ATA drives: Backwards compatible.

Also, because of the Mac Pro's "slide it in and forgetaboutit" drive installation, I never actually saw with my own eyes that the connectors inside the computer didn't fit the drives that I was installing. They slide into place, and all seemed ok (obviously). But all was not.

So now I just have to pick up some new SATA hard drives for my new machine. It's probably due time anyway.

Oh yeah. Remember that burning smell? Upon further inspection of one drive that I still haven't been able to mount, I found a burnt chip on the controller board! So my only recourse is to either use a data recovery service (that costs an arm and a leg...) or I find another drive of the same brand/model and swap controller boards in the hopes that it works long enough for me to get my data off of there.

The drive happens to be my music projects drive. Luckily, I backed up all my data from that drive one month ago so I only lost the last 30-40 days worth of work. Unfortunately, Ivan-I and I started a track last Thursday. That work is gone. Oh, and I was near completion of a track for a new label, Farmhaus Records. That's gone too. Otherwise, i have the rest backed up (thankfully because of these experiences!) This just gives me a reason to tear into a music project on it right away to meet the deadlines. What better way to get used to using a new computer then under the fire?

What have I learned? Read and understand all (and I do mean ALL) of the specs ahead of time! DER!

This won't be happening again. Why? I went out and bought an external enclosure for my 750 gig Seagate UATA drive so I can still use it with my Mac Pro as a (you guessed it!) Time Machine backup drive! Ahhhh, backup bliss.