28th
Troubleshooting the Weekend
My Mac suffered a catastrophic system failure Saturday.
When something breaks, and you happen to know how to fix that thing, the good news is that you’re unlikely to simply give up.
The bad news is that you may drive yourself mad figuring it out.
It’s faint praise to say that the Mac’s file system, known as HFS-Plus or Mac OS Extended with Journaling, is the best among its peers.
Even that statement is easily debatable. Although the system is robust in ordinary use, when it fails, it does so spectacularly. The user is thus left bewildered, but the damage is frequently recoverable.
So it was, after several hours of digging, I discovered that this weekend’s catastrophic system failure was the result of:
- untidy housekeeping by the HFS file system causing a volume indexing error;
- a new version of AirPort Utility that brutalized disk permissions on my Mac (thanks for that, Apple—that’s just sloppy);
- and triggered by a bug in the DVD burning routine that emerges when the laser can’t calibrate correctly.
No, I’m really not making this up.
But simply diagnosing the problem is only half the battle. If you can’t get it working again, it’s hardly worth the fight.
So after:
- a safe boot;
- a PRAM zap;
- a DVD drive lens cleaning (something from Memorex);
- a bootable clone mirror routine (SuperDuper);
- a file index maintenance scan (TechTool Deluxe);
- a repair permissions sweep (Disk Utility);
- and a disk repair exercise when mounted from an external device (SuperDuper + Disk Utility, with thanks to alternate drive booting courtesy of the alt/option key and my obsessive backup drive routine),
everything is back to normal.
Luckily, I had a backup from just a few days prior, and all the changes since then were synced to Dropbox or were IMAP email that immediately updated.
Total data lost: zero. Total time pursuing the solution: about half a day.
So what’s a person to do when they can’t do this themselves? I guess that’s why the Apple Store Genius Bar stays in business.
They are the shady tree mechanics of the 21st Century.
Except without the shade.
Or the tree.
More importantly, this is why the general purpose computer is slowly drifting toward marginalization, and consumer facing devices like tablets will eventually sit at the center of the technology universe.
Who needs the truck after all?
