White snow agains the black ice ...

This weekend I chose to reinstall my MacBook. The main reason was that, some time ago, I screwed up my language support be removing all unwanted languages with Monolingual. MacOS X application bundles usually come in Universal Binarys and can contain many translations. This nice monolingual application enables you to remove all these unwanted PPC binaries and unwanted languages. Stupid as I am I didn't realize that by removing Dutch and French my spellcheck would also loose these languages.
Unfortunately MacOS X isn't documented like Linux and I couldn't find what files I was missing. The only solution: reinstall.

I took my courage with both hands and started making backups on my LaCie USB disk of 250 GB. After 30 mins of intensive tar cf /Volumes/UNTITLED/backup/${name}.tar ${name} all my data was backed up on my disk.
A simple tar tf filename.tar showed me that my files were indeed present in the tar archive.

Time to reinstall my Mac ! Everything went fine, except...kernel panics when installing the updates. Looks like Mac doesn't like unknown kernel modules running when doing such a big update. Reboot not possible, Reinstall... Finally my mac was installed and updated. Only then I started to reinstall the software I need. In such situations you really miss package managers like Linux has. This means going to every website and downloading that one piece of software from there, and hopping to the next website...

Like all unix platforms I know MacOS X has a centralized place for the user-preferences. /Users/$username/Library/ it is.
I connected my ext2 disk to my Mac and realized again that I needed a driver for that. Ex2fsx it is. Unfortunately that stupid driver went weird and screwed up my filesystem.

The pleasure starts now. Well, fortunately I was able to copy my Documents and mails before it all went wrong. So with old backups I could live without the need for a suicide. But first let's do some data-recovery...
No problem, been there, done that. Take work-laptop, boot linux, plug in the USB disk, that is automagically mounted, start copying data, done. NOT !
For obscure reasons my USB device (/dev/sdc*) disappeared from /dev/ when trying to copy/access data. The dmesg output said things like Buffer I/O error on device sdc and EXT3-fs error (device sg1): ext3_find_entry: reading directory blablabla.

I started to panic a little. Some FOSDEM related things were not in my 2month old backup. What should I do?
Trying different ways to access the data or repair the partition: fsck, dd. But they all failed. Well, time to get some sleep.

This morning I concluded I had only one solution: Open the case and connect the disk to a computer directly, and so bypassing the SATA-to-usb-controller. Maybe this will work better. But how should I do this? I can't find any screws on the case... With some patience I could find the right way to open the black-box.

Here are the instructions to open a black LaCie USB case:

Finally I connected the disk to my parents machine that has SATA support. Booted it again from my BT3-live-usb, mounted it manually, quickly backed up the data. Did a fsck /dev/sda2 and took a deep breath. All data recovered !