Crash and Recovery: My First Problem with my MacBook Pro
While running my MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard, I was typing a response to an e-mail Saturday night (ironically, a friend of mine had written to ask questions about OS X) when I realized that the CD Eject key on my Logitech S530 keyboard had stopped working. I tried some of the other specialty keys and they still did. Normally, I would believe I had a hardware problem (bad key); but my feelings were telling me the problem was more than likely due to software. To investigate that, I went to the Logitech website and downloaded the latest version of the S530 driver.
The download and installation proceeded without incident. At the end, the installation program asked for a reboot of the system, which I approved. The reboot appeared to be proceeding normally at first: up came the grey screen, the slightly darker grey Apple logo, and the little twirling wagon wheel that shows hard disk access is occurring. And that’s where it stopped, with the wagon wheel twirling its little heart out.
Something had corrupted part of the boot record or files when the driver had been written to disk.
Now, I don’t keep much data on my MacBook’s internal hard disk. There’s usually just the projects I am immediately working on. Still, I didn't want to lose any of that, even if the impacts were small. More importantly, I did not want to go through all the aggravation of calling Adobe on the phone to activate a new installation of CS3 products installed only a week ago. So, I wanted to recover this hard disk without having to reinstall the whole thing. I had been backing up the MBP's hard drive with external drive that also included almost all the other data and pictures and music I had. To pair it down to applications alone would mean I had to move all the rest of it to some other safe haven, a process that would take several hours. It didn't take me long to realize that type of setup really wasn’t serving me as well as I had thought it would. But, now, it was too late...
I hooked the MacBook Pro up to the external hard disk I usually run from and booted up on it. Using its copy of Disk Utility, I ran the “Repair Disk” utility against the MacBook Pro’s internal hard disk. Sure enough, Repair Disk reported a volume header had been corrupted and then repaired it. To be safe, I also had Disk Utility repair permissions on the volume. Then, I rebooted, allowing the MBP to go back to its internal hard disk.
All I saw was grey screen. Oh, nooooo! A reinstallation of the operating system was now looking like a probability. But what if instead of installing the whole thing, I tried first to reinstall just the version update? I decided to give that try, hoping it would restore whatever boot file had been corrupted.
So, I booted the MacBook Pro back up on its external hard disk again, went to the Apple website and downloaded the OS 10.4.9 combo updater, and double-clicked on the file to launch its expansion and installation. When the installation asked me which hard disk to install to (it showed me both the external hard disk and the internal hard disk as options), I selected the internal hard disk. I watched the installer write its files to that disk, optimize them, and report the software installation was completed. I told the MBP to restart, and this time allowed it to boot up on its own internal hard disk.
Success!
I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see the machine boot into its normal desktop with all the data files I had been working on and all the Adobe applications still working. I checked the S530's CD Eject key function by inserting a CD and then hitting the key, and it worked as expected.
Before doing anything else, I ventured back into my storage closet and pulled out the external Firewire hard drives I used to backup all our systems to inventory them. I hadn’t looked at how I had assigned them since I had bought the Mac Pro. I use one of the Mac Pro's internal drives as a backup drive (clone) to the boot drive. I don’t need an external drive to back it up except for some data stored on its two-drive RAID 1 set. Anyway, I had enough storage available to back up everything but the external Firewire hard drive I use with the MBP, and ninety-five percent of its data is on the Mac Pro, which is the machine I consider my “master” desktop. Using a 120GB Maxtor hard drive in a third party Firewire 400 case, I backed up the MacBook Pro's internal hard disk and then went around the house using the other hard disks to backup my wife’s Intel iMac and her black MacBook.
The whole episode demonstrated the value of not only having backup external hard drives but the blessed Mac capability of being able to boot and run normally from them. My experience on Windows XP suggests if the kind of corruption I had experienced on the MBP had occurred on my XP partition, I’d still be reinstalling XP and everything else in it.
The download and installation proceeded without incident. At the end, the installation program asked for a reboot of the system, which I approved. The reboot appeared to be proceeding normally at first: up came the grey screen, the slightly darker grey Apple logo, and the little twirling wagon wheel that shows hard disk access is occurring. And that’s where it stopped, with the wagon wheel twirling its little heart out.
Something had corrupted part of the boot record or files when the driver had been written to disk.
Now, I don’t keep much data on my MacBook’s internal hard disk. There’s usually just the projects I am immediately working on. Still, I didn't want to lose any of that, even if the impacts were small. More importantly, I did not want to go through all the aggravation of calling Adobe on the phone to activate a new installation of CS3 products installed only a week ago. So, I wanted to recover this hard disk without having to reinstall the whole thing. I had been backing up the MBP's hard drive with external drive that also included almost all the other data and pictures and music I had. To pair it down to applications alone would mean I had to move all the rest of it to some other safe haven, a process that would take several hours. It didn't take me long to realize that type of setup really wasn’t serving me as well as I had thought it would. But, now, it was too late...
I hooked the MacBook Pro up to the external hard disk I usually run from and booted up on it. Using its copy of Disk Utility, I ran the “Repair Disk” utility against the MacBook Pro’s internal hard disk. Sure enough, Repair Disk reported a volume header had been corrupted and then repaired it. To be safe, I also had Disk Utility repair permissions on the volume. Then, I rebooted, allowing the MBP to go back to its internal hard disk.
All I saw was grey screen. Oh, nooooo! A reinstallation of the operating system was now looking like a probability. But what if instead of installing the whole thing, I tried first to reinstall just the version update? I decided to give that try, hoping it would restore whatever boot file had been corrupted.
So, I booted the MacBook Pro back up on its external hard disk again, went to the Apple website and downloaded the OS 10.4.9 combo updater, and double-clicked on the file to launch its expansion and installation. When the installation asked me which hard disk to install to (it showed me both the external hard disk and the internal hard disk as options), I selected the internal hard disk. I watched the installer write its files to that disk, optimize them, and report the software installation was completed. I told the MBP to restart, and this time allowed it to boot up on its own internal hard disk.
Success!
I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see the machine boot into its normal desktop with all the data files I had been working on and all the Adobe applications still working. I checked the S530's CD Eject key function by inserting a CD and then hitting the key, and it worked as expected.
Before doing anything else, I ventured back into my storage closet and pulled out the external Firewire hard drives I used to backup all our systems to inventory them. I hadn’t looked at how I had assigned them since I had bought the Mac Pro. I use one of the Mac Pro's internal drives as a backup drive (clone) to the boot drive. I don’t need an external drive to back it up except for some data stored on its two-drive RAID 1 set. Anyway, I had enough storage available to back up everything but the external Firewire hard drive I use with the MBP, and ninety-five percent of its data is on the Mac Pro, which is the machine I consider my “master” desktop. Using a 120GB Maxtor hard drive in a third party Firewire 400 case, I backed up the MacBook Pro's internal hard disk and then went around the house using the other hard disks to backup my wife’s Intel iMac and her black MacBook.
The whole episode demonstrated the value of not only having backup external hard drives but the blessed Mac capability of being able to boot and run normally from them. My experience on Windows XP suggests if the kind of corruption I had experienced on the MBP had occurred on my XP partition, I’d still be reinstalling XP and everything else in it.
posted by Andy Foster at
5:58 PM
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