Self-healing iMacs?
I've been fighting with Mac problems ever since shortly after I moved it from Troy to Ann Arbor. The 10.5.8 patch I tried to install after getting it set up froze during install and, after waiting a good half hour, I gave up and shut it down.
Big mistake #1.
Something got screwed up so badly by doing that, it couldn't even find the OS during bootup. After five failed attempts at restoring from Time Machine backup, three format-and-reinstalls, two calls to Apple, and one dire threat from Aaron to send it to the Apple store, it finally seemed to be behaving normally, if still lagging a bit during disk operations. Spotlight seemed to be the last culprit, endlessly indexing my hard drive and backup drive, until I forced it to stop and rebuild the index from scratch. It was much better, but still didn't feel quite stable.
Then, last night, I was trying to update WoW addons and ran into permission errors. I used Privilege Fix, which had worked perfectly at mass-correcting my file permissions after restoring from backup (bless you, whoever made this program), on my entire Applications directory. It was chugging along fine until it got about halfway through the 217,000 files, then froze. I waited about a half hour while it did nothing, then gave up and shut it down.
Big mistake #2.
When I turned it back on, I got the dreaded grey circle-slash of "no OS found". I booted from the install disk, ran Disk Utility, and finally saw the message that validated what I'd suspected from the very beginning of all my troubles with this:
-----
This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility.
If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive.
-----
Glorious. Well, now at least I could call Apple, show them proof of hardware failure (I took a pic of the screen), and get a new drive. I shut it down and went to bed. I got up early this morning, hoping to prep and ride Stormshadow to work, but got rained out. Just for the hell of it, I flipped on the iMac to confirm it was still dead.
It booted.
Not only did it boot, it booted flawlessly, with none of the delays I'd been experiencing for the last three weeks. Every program set to run automatically ran normally. Every program I started manually started immediately, without bouncing in the dock for 30 seconds first. It finally feels stable, with none of the split-second delays and hesitations that, taken together, told me something was wrong.
I'm totally floored. I have no idea how it could have gone from "fatal hardware error" to perfect operation, overnight, while shut off.
Posted via email from Ryan's posterous
Big mistake #1.
Something got screwed up so badly by doing that, it couldn't even find the OS during bootup. After five failed attempts at restoring from Time Machine backup, three format-and-reinstalls, two calls to Apple, and one dire threat from Aaron to send it to the Apple store, it finally seemed to be behaving normally, if still lagging a bit during disk operations. Spotlight seemed to be the last culprit, endlessly indexing my hard drive and backup drive, until I forced it to stop and rebuild the index from scratch. It was much better, but still didn't feel quite stable.
Then, last night, I was trying to update WoW addons and ran into permission errors. I used Privilege Fix, which had worked perfectly at mass-correcting my file permissions after restoring from backup (bless you, whoever made this program), on my entire Applications directory. It was chugging along fine until it got about halfway through the 217,000 files, then froze. I waited about a half hour while it did nothing, then gave up and shut it down.
Big mistake #2.
When I turned it back on, I got the dreaded grey circle-slash of "no OS found". I booted from the install disk, ran Disk Utility, and finally saw the message that validated what I'd suspected from the very beginning of all my troubles with this:
-----
This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility.
If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive.
-----
Glorious. Well, now at least I could call Apple, show them proof of hardware failure (I took a pic of the screen), and get a new drive. I shut it down and went to bed. I got up early this morning, hoping to prep and ride Stormshadow to work, but got rained out. Just for the hell of it, I flipped on the iMac to confirm it was still dead.
It booted.
Not only did it boot, it booted flawlessly, with none of the delays I'd been experiencing for the last three weeks. Every program set to run automatically ran normally. Every program I started manually started immediately, without bouncing in the dock for 30 seconds first. It finally feels stable, with none of the split-second delays and hesitations that, taken together, told me something was wrong.
I'm totally floored. I have no idea how it could have gone from "fatal hardware error" to perfect operation, overnight, while shut off.
Posted via email from Ryan's posterous