Re: June 2007 Birthdays

On Jul 6, 8:26 pm, johnny bobby bee <useraddshine...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Donz5 wrote:
That's ok; I'm halfway back from 24 hours in hell -- my new computer
went kablooey last night, HD directory in ruins, unable to boot to
desktop but instead dragged into "Terminal," Mac's unix program.

I know it's too late now, but did you try things like starting up in
'safe mode' or 'single user mode'? Then running fsck?

What happened, do you know? Have you checked the log files?

I may not have enough bandwidth to detail all the fun I had from
Wednesday night until Thursday night. I'm pretty sure that my HD's
directory had become too corrupt to function properly, all pushed
along, no doubt by the "last resort" action I had no choice but to
take -- force-shutting-down the computer.

So, when I rebooted, instead of entering the desktop, the computer
wheezed and sneezed its way into its core Unix platform, with white
text over black screen, scrolling all sorts of error messages, and
unwilling to give up its bat and ball for a use prompt.

Safe Mode had no effect.

The thought, of course, was to try to restart up the machine with a
bootable disk (like DiskWarrior or OS X's installation disk), but
there was no way to open the drives without the computer already up
and running (just hit the eject key). The good news is that I had
another operational computer, so I was able to go online and search
for answers. The bad news is that I found no help on how to manually
open the damn things. (More on this later)

But I did read about booting with Command-S pressed, which would get
me into Unix with user prompts, and I copied some of the FSCK command
options. Keep in mind that I know zippo about any computer language,
including Unix, and I learned just today that if one doesn't add a
space before a slash, or if you _do_ add a space before a slash, you
might have the capacity to accidently 'splode a nuclear bomb inside
your drive.

So it's not exactly that had a clue what I was doing.

Thursday morning, I finally figured out how to manually open the CD/
DVD drives (it's not as accessible it it's supposed to be; first
there's opening the door, which was its own treat, then you gotta sift
through the double-grill and find the "eject" button that you can
access only with precise paper-clip manipulation.

But I got it open, and I stuck in DiskWarrior, and booted up. Got into
the program, and it began to piece through the HD, finding, first, 50
errors, then 53, then 60, then 70, then 120. I realized this was going
to take days before it completed its damage search, so, at 225 errors,
I stopped it and decided to try the FSCK method. Into Unix I ventured.

Did the FSCK command, it found tons of errors, then said that the
drive couldn't be repaired. I read to keep doing it until it read,
"This disk appears to be ok," but that never happened.

And I couldn't eject DiskWarrior -- the paper clip no longer did the
trick. I was able to insert the OS X Installation disk into the 2nd
"superdrive," but the Mac wouldn't recognize it as a bootable disk,
and back I was into Unix.

One sidenote: Tuesday, Apple called me to let me know that my 2-month
free warranty was to expire on Wednesday and asked if I were
interested in purchasing an extended warranty that would last 3 years.
I said no thanks. The next day, of course, ka-boom. There must have
been a timer in this thing.

After trying another Unix command I found online, a command that Unix
responded with "not a recognizable" something or other, I broke down
and called AppleCare. First got a courteous gentlemann in the
Philippines, who kept on insisting that I had a laptop. I finally
convinced him that if I did, I'd be sterile by now, so he redirected
my call to a lovely woman in Canada, though she's actually from India.

After describing everything, she told me about the warranty deal, and
after getting guarantees as to free onsite inspection, if needed, I
agreed. We then worked through various options for the next 2 hours.
One tip I'm very glad to have learned, and wished I had learned it
much earlier, was the Opening-the-Superdrive" trick: just hold the
mouse down while booting up, and the drives magically open all by
their lonesome.

(I can count the number of people reading this by the accumulation of
snores my fingers are picking up.)

But I figured I had to manually push the drive door shut before
rebooting, but every time I did reboot, the door would cough the disk
out. Every time. That's when the Canadian woman from India suspected I
had a logic board problem in addition to the hard drive, and thus
authorized the replacement of these parts for the forthcoming onsite
inspection. I said ok, and that was that. But I didn't think I had any
logic board issues.

Around 10 minute later, after we had hung up, I tried something I
hadn't before -- with the drives open, instead of manually pushing it
closed, with a bootable disk in it, I left it open, and rebooted. Lo
and behold, the drive door automatically closed, and so I immediately
pressed the "c" key to see if its disk would boot the Mac. Miracles of
miracles, it did.

I tried DiskWarrior again, and, probably because of all the repair
attempts made via FSCK, DiskWarrior went lickety-split, and within
just minutes said that it had repaired everything it could, but that
there were "some" files missing, and "some" files relocated into a
folder it had created, called "lost and found." But it was all clear
to replace the corrupt directory with a brand-new rebuilt one, and I
went ahead and did that.

But when I rebooted, the drive continued to whisk me away into Unix.
Probably, all those relocated files made it impossible for the system
to know where everything was, when they weren't where it figured
they'd be.

I have 2 internal drives, the bad one being the bootable, the second
one for some (but not all) data backup. So I now rebooted with the OS
X disk and installed the system into the 2nd, operational drive.

That did the trick -- at least I could now boot up into the desktop,
and I finally had a chance to inspect the damage on the first HD.
That's when I saw the "lost and found" folder and realized that there
were 1,369 _folders_ of relocated files (I had earlier said 1,369
files, but that was before I counted the first 100 folders and noticed
I was less than 1/10th done).

Some of the files are where they're supposed to be, but too many are
scattered all over the place in the "lost and found" folder. So what
I'll do is copy those files I need (unless they're not copyable; I've
found a few of them) to the 2nd drive, and then reinstall all
application programs onto the 2nd drive as well, then format the first
drive. That's my weekend plan.

I got a call from Apple today -- they ordered a new logic board, HD,
and RAM chips; should be in next week, when a tech guy will inspect
the computer and then replace what he determines isn't working as it
should. I'll probably get the HD replaced, and maybe if I give him a
free "Red Horizon" CD, he'll just add on more RAM without replacing
what's there now.

Oh yeah, the log files: I did have a look-see; they begin with last
night's installation of the system into the 2nd drive. Maybe a fuller
log is hidden in one of the 1,369 "lost and found" folders. After I
copy what I need to copy, I'll search around, but right now, it's not
a priority. I still think it was an increasingly corrupt director
after one-too-many forced restarts, with no maintenance (weekly
DiskWarrior clean-ups) inbetween.

Thanks for asking? :)


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