Frank's Blog

Once upon a day… there was an Apple Imac with OS 10.5 that denied to startup.
The grey screen with the apple logo and the circulating little thing just didn’t disappear.
So I was called.
I started the system while pressing cmd-v between the “taaa”-chime and the apple logo appearing. So the system switch to text mode and gave me some more informations. It stucked with an hd error. So, the problem was found.
I started the Mac again with an appropiate install cd and pressing “c” to boot the little system with the helper tools.
After selecting the language I ignored the installation dialog and started the disk utility from the menu bar.
But disk utiliy didn’t find partition, just the whole harddisc without any information.
I quit the graphical disk utility and started a Terminal in which I typed:
“diskutil list”. This tool was able to show the lost partitions.
So, there was some information left, but how recover them ?
I searched for a tool for recovering the partition table on OSX.
testdisk should do this, but I cannot bring it to run on the install system quickly so I decided to give it a try with the Linux distribution CAINE. It’s a live system to do forensics analysis and also contains the testdist tool.
Booting from the fresh burned CAINE disc took some time but finally I had a Linux desktop (which I not really needed for now) and started testdisk within terminal.

Testdisk found the lost partitions and let me write them back to the EFI sector.
So far so good.
I started the diskutility from the install cd again and now it listed the partitions but kindda incomplete (marked in light grey) and verify and repair fails.

Now I changed my strategy. There is a harddisc problem anyway, so I have to replace it. But I would like to recover the user data on it. Therefore I don’t have to start the installed OSX. Instead I started again CAINE which let me mount the partition without any problems and I copied the home folder via network and rsync to another Mac.
Problem solved for this time (what took me so long ?).

I’m mostly using Eclipse on Mac OSX for my little programming tasks, I don’t see me as a real programmer although I learned it as a professional a few years ago. I would agree if you think that I break a fly on on the wheel by using this powerful environment two write some shell scripts, e. g.
I like Eclipse because of the platform indepence, the lots of plugins (like subversion) and the support of so much programming languages.
Anyway, the default configuration of my installation was (and maybe still is) not perfect for my needs. Here comes the first change I did.

Key bindings of square brackets
Typing “[" or "]” results in an error message.

I was surprised not to find the solution easily in google. I never have been the first guy finding an error in anything.
So, to have the solution erverytime available, I decided to write it down here.
Go to Eclipse->Preferences->Keys, type “[" in the right field with "type filter text" above the commands list, mark the according line and klick "Remove Binding".
Do the same with "]” and “}”.

At this point I have to admit, that I didn’t check what good for are these bindings, maybe I’ll run in trouble later using another programming language, buts it’s perfect for the moment.

to be continued…