Damn, what a weekend

Well, first I find out that the Coil Pack in the Golf is on the way out - which is no huge surprise, as it appears to be a failure-prone part and I've got over 100,000km on it. I'm going to try and fix it up with some high-temperature silicone sealant and see if I can get a few thousand more km out of it. Otherwise, it's not cheap to replace, and the replacement part is built to the same standard as the original one, so it will eventually fail again.

There are a couple of options for replacement. There's the OEM with plug-n-play goodness, and a price tag to match - probably around $400+

The other option is to go the DIY. With a ~$100 Ford coil pack, and crimp some different plugs on the end of the ignition leads. Even if I have to get one brand new from the States, rather than getting one off eBay it will set me back less than half the price of the OEM one.



Now, to make matters worse, my hard drive has gone the way of the coil pack. The SMART status on it finally said it was going to fail - all of about 5 minutes before I could no longer mount the disk on the desktop. Yeah, thanks for the warning!

Now, I'm having to resort to something along these lines:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s3 | gzip > harddrive-image.gz

340MB (of 80-odd GB) and it's only gotten a bit stuck once at around the 250MB mark. Unfortunately Disk Utility is scared off too easily by I/O errors, and aborts creating an image, whereas good ol' dd should sort me out. Wish me luck.