![]() ![]() When you install Mac OS X 10.5 now, it asks you if you are migrating from another machine. This was the first time I had a hard drive crash after using Time Machine, and I was eager to try it out. Time spent: 10 minutes.ħ) Reinstalled Mac OS X on System Drive. Afterward, a quick Disk Verify confirmed a shocking outcome… the drive was fine. Was the drive that old? In any case, I reformatted with the appropriate GUID setting for booting Intel macs, and with journaling enabled. Disk Utility was able to reformat the drive – I noticed the old formatting was Mac OS X, without journaling enabled. Well, Mac OS X told me to, right? I was surprised, but I tried it. Time spent: 20 minutes.Ħ) Reformat system drive. Fortunately, a Finder copy of my user directory worked, providing an extra backup of files, just in case. (You do this by dragging the hard drive icon from the desktop over the Disk Utility application). I immediately tried to use Disk Utility to create a disk image of the disk, but it failed. I did get a strange system warning that I’d never seen before, telling me the disk had problems and that I should reformat it. Why not turn tragedy into opportunity?) Unfortunately, the disk mounted. I was ready to run down to Fry’s to get a new HD (or better yet, a new SSD. Who knows, I didn’t come back to the machine for several hours.ĥ) Assess whether the system drive is lost cause. While that happened, I went to have breakfast and actually get productive chores done. Installed OS X on that drive and rebooted. Fortunately, my iTunes HD had a few hundred GB free. Running the system off DVD is slow, and you are limited in options without a full Finder. Time spent: 10 minutes.Ĥ) Get Mac OS X installed on another hard drive. Worse, Disk Utility basically told me that I was crazy if I thought it could fix them. My main system drive, a 300GB Western Digital, had problems. On the Mac OS DVD, a little known trick is that while the installer is running, you can go to the Menu Bar, and select “Disk Utility” to run diagnostics on your disk. Total time spent: 20 minutes.ģ) Diagnose the boot drive. Got the tray opened, popped in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD, and began to boot. Plugged in, holding down the “C” key (nostalgia: the “C” is for CD, and they never migrated to “D” for DVD.) In any case, if there is no DVD in the drive with a bootable OS, it opens the tray. Fortunately, I keep a USB keyboard around. The machine wasn’t getting far enough in the boot sequence to load Bluetooth, so my wireless keyboard was useless. In my case, it proved harder than you might think. For those “Dodgeball” movie fans, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” For Macs, “If you can boot of a DVD, then your hardware can boot anything.” It’s not totally true, but true enough. In either case, the machine was not getting to the normal boot sequence.Ģ) Tried to boot of DVD. It was either a hardware issue, or the system was corrupted. ![]() The lack of either the blinking folder or the regular boot sequence told me I was on dangerous ground. Grey screen, Apple logo, spin icon… then grey screen and reboot. In this case, rebooting went into an endless loop. But there is always that hope that just rebooting will magically “fix” the problem. The bad news is that it also proves that this stuff is still way too hard:ġ) Tried to reboot. The good news is that it proves out the benefit of using backup software, like Time Machine. Just in case its useful, here’s what I did. When I say “normal”, I mean people who haven’t actually developed software on the Mac, who haven’t worked repairing Macs, and who haven’t spent countless hours futzing with their own machines. ![]() I don’t know how “normal people” deal with problems like this. Some apps had been misbehaving, and I thought a full shut down & reboot was in order. On Friday night, before bed, I had shutdown the machine. No icon, no progress, nothing.Ī quick press of the power button confirmed it – simple power down. My Mac Pro was locked in some sort of grey screen. I went to check email Saturday morning, and was greeted with quite a shock. ![]()
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