Short Order Techout here there be geeks

I’m guessing that’s not a good thing to have when you reboot due to unusual sluggishness?

Well, at this point I have tried the following in this order:

1. I rebooted into the Snow Leopard DVD and ran Disk Verify.  It verified fine so I ran Disk Repair, it completed, then I repaired permissions, and rebooted.  No change, blinking icon o’ death.
2. I rebooted into the Snow Leopard DVD and re-installed Leopard (didn’t format).  No good.  Still toast
3. I held down CMD+OPT+P+R and turned on the Mac to clear the PRAM.  No good
4. I grabbed the Super Duper clone of my wifes Macbook that I made prior to installing Snow Leopard and booted right up to it and am currently authoring this post on my Icon o’ Death Macbook Pro booted up as my wife’s Macbook (twisted eh?)

While writing this, I ran another verify against the HDD and it came back clean as well.  (See screenie on right).  I am going to try and re-select the HDD as my startup drive and reboot.  If that doesn’t work I am going to nuke and pave this son of a bitch and see how it likes them Apples.  Be back shortly.

Alright, this has got to be something simple.  My last updated stated that I was about to try and reselect my startup disk and see if that fixed it…  Well, prior to doing so I had the brilliant idea to actually try and access the drive… (go figure)  Sure as I did, I am streaming video off it, and currently 1/2 way through copying off my Aperture Library (14gigs) my iPhoto Library (8 gigs) and my iWeb Domain database (2gigs) and so far haven’t stumbled once.  So, to use another series of bullets and numbers (Im a sucker for lists), we know the following:

1. I can’t boot to the internal drive, there are no repairs to be made
2. I can boot from a clone of another Mac via USB
3. While booted into said clone, I can access the drive that wont boot and have all but proven it is fine.

I’ll take 3:5 that the boot voodoo is corrupted and if I wipe and re-install it will be all good.  If that doesn’t work, then there has to be a larger issue and this bad boy is going back to Apple…  This is the first time I am kicking myself for not having a copy of Drive Warrior on hand to sick on this drive, but between the stuff I just pulled off and Time Machine, its not really that big a deal if I have to go all hard pipe hitting geek on the install.

Well, after numerous attempts to reset the drive as the startup drive and no luck, I have resorted to plan Y.  I have wiped the drive and am currently running the installer.  It is installing suspiciously slow but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me.  It also seems like the fans are going all out, but the progress bar is moving so I guess its doing its thing.  The machine isn’t warm and I don’t hear head collisions so who knows what the hell is going on. One way or another, if this doesn’t work, its on to plan Z which is engaging Apple on Tuesday and getting a new drive.

Well, that seemed to have done it.  I am up and running on a clean install.  I am going to reboot a half a dozen or so times and then get some sleep.  I will migrate everything back over tomorrow.  

Alright, working off the Mini this morning while I perform a (drum roll) Time Machine Restore…  I have heard the horror stories surrounding Time Machine, so I am slightly concerned about how well this is going to work.  Then again, I am also sort of glad this happened as I can notch the whole “Disaster Recovery” on a Mac thing on my bandolier o’ geekery.

That being said, I have learned a few things, and come to a few conclusions moving forwards after this event.  First and foremost, I have to say this is the first time in my life (I have witnessed it happen to others) that my system simply died on me.  Granted, it was more of a mock up as I still had access to my drive and data even though I couldn’t boot to it, but for all intensive purposes, a sound simulation.  Bear in mind that I did copy data off last night, but am proceeding with the rebuild as though I had not.  Taking all that into account, I want to talk about Time Machine.

Like most Mac Users, I run 24 incremental backup jobs daily.  I send mine to a networked HDD hooked up to my router.  I have been tempted with the idea to get a mod that will only backup my systems once per day however had I done that I would definitely be missing a couple of hours of work given the time frame of this event.  I will leave Time Machine alone.  Secondly, I learned a good bit about restoring after a disaster.  Since I backup to a network volume, Time Machine only wants to look for that volume to restore my data.  Well, there is no way I am going to restore 95 gigs over the wire when I could plug the HDD directly into my Mac.  Enter problem number:

1. If you plug the previously networked Time Machine Volume directly into your Mac, it will see the drive, but if you try to open Time Machine it will not see the backup.
2. If you hold down Option while clicking the Time Machine Icon in the menu, you will see “Browse other Time Machine Disks” but if you click it, a blank menu comes up without your Time Machine Volume…

Now this may sound silly that I didn’t try it, but the actual solution here is to plug the drive up locally, open it, and then double click on the sparse bundle for the Mac you want to restore.  In my case “Macbook Pro”.  At this point it will mount the sparse bundle like a drive and you can either “Option + browse other Time Machine Disks” or, do as I have done and launch the migration assistant.  This of course has it a hurdle of its own as well.  Since I had to perform a clean install, I naturally setup my user account like always once it finished.  Well, the problem is that the migration assistant wants to setup that exact same user account and as a result will not import your data unless you rename your account.  To avoid this, I created an admin account and named it “Sysop” and then deleted my user account off the Mac.  After that I simply logged in as Sysop, mounted the sparse bundle, and then launched the migration assistant.  The assistant immediately found the sparse bundle, I clicked import, and in 2 hours I should be back to where I was at 7:46PM last night (the time of my last incremental) with no harm done.  That however will be the subject of my (hopefully) final update to this event and will have to wait until after farmers market.

My thoughts are somewhat scattered here since I am writing this real time, but I also need to plug Mobile Me here.  I just so happened to try the 60 day trial last week to agree that it was crap or to debunk and sing its praises, and please plug your ears whilst I sing.  I am syncing Mobile me from my (dead) Macbook Pro to my Mac Mini media server, and its brilliant.  Even with my Mac down, I have access to my contacts, calendars, and mail accounts and bookmarks.  I was able to jump over to the Mini, open up Safari, and operate as though I was still on my Macbook Pro.  My wife and I have already been going over the Calendar, and I am using the Mail App to check my IMAP accounts as though nothing ever happened.  I am very pleased with this and will now officially roll it into my recommendations for the ultimate disaster recovery suite.  Its like a Colo in a can.

Before I wrap this update, I will say that as cheap as hard drives are these days, I am going to go ahead and take my backup strategy to the next level and go buy myself a small dedicated drive.  I will use that drive to run a scheduled Super Duper clone nightly so that the next time something like this happens I have at least a 23 hour and 59 minute old bootable snap shot of my Mac.  With something like this available,  I can use it to regain access to my Mac, or any Mac for that matter and then clone it back over to my Mac and use time Machine to catch up on whatever happened in between.  If that last paragraph went into orbit, I apologize, its been a runaway train of a post.

Alright, Farmers Market…

 Update on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 1:04 PM by Bush Williams

Back from the Farmers Market and the migration was complete.  I am now back up and running with no issues.  I can only presume that the boot voodoo on my HDD got corrupted or perhaps it is a larger issue waiting to crop back up anytime…  Not sure, only time and usage will tell, but all in all, recovery was a breeze.

/Cheers