Hard Disk recovery

Just the other day I had a hard drive "stop mounting" with this type of message:

Disk Utility was no help. So I took it to a friend who has Disk Warrior. Again no luck.

After some research into other products, I saw that Data Rescue II by Pro Soft Engineering had a demo version. Download away.

Seems that it's a great product. At first it found no files - but I was trying to scan the partition. When I scanned the whole drive (not just the partition that wasn't mounting), then it provided a list of files for me to recover to another hard drive!

One interesting part of their philosophy is that recovery is a read-only operation. This is great because it prevents anything from being further corrupted by a repair gone wrong.

So now I'll be buying a copy and another 200+GB drive to recover my data onto.

Thanks Pro Soft Engineering for a great product.

On thing is odd though... why is it called Data Rescue II version 1.2? Wouldn't it just be version 2.2? :)

ADSL but only 1

We finally have an ADSL connection at home.

Our mobile broadband has been pretty good. It has similar specs, which is great to achieve over mobile network, but the ping time and responsiveness of the service was terrible.

I guess that's an advantage to using a real (good) ISP than a phone company.

3 Mobile Broadband

Today we got a 3 mobile broadband USB modem.

So far it works great. Here's our speed we're getting initially:



1224 kbit/s download is not too bad. It's no adsl2 or cable modem speeds, but given the crap we're going through at the moment getting a hardwired connection this interim solution might be what we keep!

More Thoughts on Australia's Internet Censorship plans

I sent a letter to Stephen Conroy expressing my view that ISP level filtering in Australia would cause a significant negative performance impact on the internet and that the resources (money) spent on the filter would be better spent elsewhere (ie: law enforcement).

I wonder if Stephen Conroy would like to drive a car with a speed limiter that automatically set it's speed limit based on signs on the side of the road....

If it performed like the ISP tests have shown, then it would certainly get the speed wrong some of the time, perhaps limiting him to drive at 80km/h on a freeway or allowing him to drive at 100km/h in a suburban street! Not good for the traffic, and certainly not going to eliminate the possibility of him speeding.

I also support the letter written by Mark Newton, which you can read here. The guy has clearly done his homework, obviously more so than Senator Stephen Conroy.

Say no to censorship of the Internet! Spend the resources on police to catch people doing illegal activities instead of hampering the online performance of an entire country.