BrainDead Systems, my employer of thirty years (!) (now I think of it, I am thirty years on the payroll today, and accordingly eligible to retire by the terms of my defined-benefits plan), has not purchased me a new Macintosh since 1999. To spare wear-and-tear on the B&W G3's internal HD (a laughably tiny unit of 6 or 8 GB) I have been working with files and saving them to an 80 GB external Firewire drive—purchased on my dime after the mothership MIS folks sniffed "we don't support Firewire"—for the past few years. Last week there were signs in the heavens to the effect that the external was getting all wonky on me. I should perhaps mention that this is an OS 9.2 machine. Both the Finder and (heaven help us) "Norton Utilities" advised me that there was trouble in digital river city, but while each set of subroutines was apparently capable of smelling smoke, neither could find the way to Firewireville: the drive was unrecognized by every utility in my arsenal.

I brought it home this evening and attempted to treat it under OS X, but Disk Utility gave up immediately. Fortunately I was able to back the contents onto a DVD-R, following which I reformatted the drive, specifying OS 9 compatibility, and reloaded the files. Disk Utility blessed the reincarnation—I assume that the bad sectors, if any, have been sent to their room. We'll see on the morrow whether it all works out, but the ordeal left me with a salutary awareness that continuing to work in OS 9 leaves me increasingly out in the cold, support-wise. Time to renew my campaign for a new machine.

cordially,

but institutionally very conservative, and the MIS folks back east are utterly hostile to all things Macintosh. Times past I've had local bosses who had enough clout in the organization to ramrod new purchases past the high sheriffs, but that's not the case at the moment. I've purchased most of the software for my little skunkworks these past two decades. Here's hoping I don't have to spring for an actual computer, but it may come to that, since I'm planning to put in another five to seven years here before I bail...

cordially,