Category: General Posts

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Recovering data from my failed MacBook Pro Hitachi hard drive

I was in the middle of working on my MacBook Pro the other night when the hard drive began clicking.  The entire system froze and I was forced to power off the machine.  When I attempted to power it back on it would not boot.  I just got more clicking.  For two days this was the story.  The drive just would not spin up.  So I put in a new hard drive thinking that I would probably toss this drive in the trash.

I spoke to several people about it asking for suggestions on how I might get the drive to work.  I heard from 2 unrelated sources that keeping the drive very cool might help so I left it in a zip lock bag in the fridge last night. Then I plugged it in to my desktop machine and after a few clicks it freed up the spindle and spun up! Unfortunately Windows does not natively read HFS (the mac file system) but my my brother knew of a great little program called HFS Explorer which allows windows to extract files from an HFS partition while properly handling symlinks.   Super cool!  I’ll be recovering my data tody after which I don’t think I’ll trust the drive anymore. 

Specs on the hard drive:
Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00
2.5 inch
120 GB
5400 RPM
SATA

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PHP URL to File Path

I don’t know why it was so hard to find some code to do this.  I did a few google searches and couldn’t find a simple solution so here’s one that works…

function mh_UrlToFilePath($url="") {
  $sServerName = $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
  $sDocRoot = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
  $sUrl = substr($url, 0, strpos($url, "?")); // remove querystring
  $sFilePath = substr($sUrl,strpos($sUrl,$sServerName)+strlen($sServerName));
  $sFilePath = $sDocRoot . $sFilePath;
  $sFilePath = str_replace("/", "\", $sFilePath);
  return $sFilePath;
}
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Flash Player broken in Firefox 3 on Mac OS X

When I installed version 10 of the Flash Player on my macbook pro everything seemed to work ok.  I use WordPress and at the time v10 of flash broke the multi-upload feature.  Because of this I decided to back off to v9.  All seemed well except that I noticed that some flash based sites didn’t view at all.  I assumed that it was because they were published for flash 10.  Later on I gave in and installed the v10 player again.  I noticed that some sites still didn’t work.  I knew the problem wasn’t the plugin itself because everything worked fine in Safari.  Finally I trashed Firefox and reinstalled it.  This didn’t seem to help.  I figured there were probably some config files left behind so I trashed it again after enabling AppTrap.  This allowed me to trash all config and support files for Firefox at the same time that I trashed the application itself.  I then reinstalled and everything has been working every since then. I hope you find this post helpful if you run into the same problem.