Computer crashed

[Commander McLane]

On Sunday my MacBook Pro crashed—literally. It fell from a chair down to the floor.

First I thought no harm was done, but then things started to behave strangely. It seems some sectors of the HD are somehow corrupted, leading to some files not being readible anymore. Until now I found one Word document, four emails (of minor importance), my local version of Anarchies2.2.zip, and the ClamXav image file (I keep the downloaded images for the case of re-install) were affected.

The worse thing is that some applications don't work anymore. They freeze immediately after opening. It seems all applications which were open at the time of the crash are affected, even if the computer was sleeping at the time. Word, Excel, PListEdit Pro, TextEdit, some games, the Console which I could well need now for some diagnostics, and—worst of all—the Finder isn't stable anymore. Sometimes it takes a very long time until a folder opens and its content gets displayed (talking about minutes of looking at the spinning wheel of colour). Sometimes the Dock or the menus are unaccessible. Sometimes klicking on menu items (like "End immediatly..." or "Shut down") doesn't have an effect. Half of the time I can use the On/Off button instead, but the rest of the time it only reacts to a long press.

Safari's working—somehow. Clicking a link in a post on the board just made it crash, and the Crash Reporter is among the things that don't work anymore (probably because it's somehow related to the Console???).

Bottom line: Something's wrong (probably more like: some things are wrong). I am afraid the ultimate solution will be to reformat the HD and re-install everything. I'm not looking forward to it. The thought alone of starting with 10.4.0 again and having to download all the updates until 10.4.11 is a nightmare, considering my internet connection. Not to talk about all the other applications. A backup I did immediately after the crash froze just before finishing (progress bar at 99%), so I'm not sure what it's really worth. Anyway, for the time being I am busy with retrieving data and looking what's lost. Fortunately not much seems to have been really lost, but still, my feeling isn't too good.

So far I ran the Hardware Test (nothing found), made a HD-check (the number of free sectors was 20 too little, and the process aborted before finishing properly; nevertheless, the HD tool could repair it), and tested the memory (nothing found). Anything else I should do before the BIG ERASING?

Wish me a happy Christmas. For sure I've now got something to do during the holidays, although it wasn't what I wanted to, and I am very reluctant to go through with it.

Shall I go the same way as Rxke and go buy a new laptop? But where? The next Apple dealer isn't exactly round the corner. I'm going to be in Germany in February or March, shall I just wait till then? And what will the wife say? So many questions, so few answers...

[Kaks]

Ouch.

One thing that might be worth doing is to just replace the hard disk, it's not as expensive as getting a new laptop, and is definitely something you need.
Unfortunately, your present hard disk is now likely to develop major faults in the next year or so.

Have an otherwise peaceful & happy Christmas, and take care!

Kaks

[Greyman]

Hello,

even though I don't think you want to hear this I guess a replacement of your HD is needed. A good friend of mine had the same problem until after a few weeks his Macbook Pro stopped working at all. So he had a new HD fitted in a Apple store and all was well.

Well, I hope you will still have a nice christmas.

[Rxke]

Oh man...

I feel your pain.

[Thargoid]

Once you've got it as backed up as you can, I'd suggest carefully opening the thing and checking that all the internal connections are still in place and tight. You might have partially dislodged one of them perhaps which could cause an intermittent fault perhaps (although probably not in keeping with your symptoms).

But anyway best of luck!

[Svengali]

Wish me a happy Christmas.

Sure. Best wishes for you, your family and friends. Hopefully you can 'rescue' the data before christmas (it seems to be black days for computers currently).

When you're coming to Germany - let's have a coffee...

[Commander McLane]

Okay, the good news is that I could retrieve practically all data. I just copied everything to an external harddisk, and whenever I had an error code -36 (unable to read or write data), I threw away the corrupt file and replaced it with the identical one from my last pre-crash backup. A total of about 50 files was corrupt, which is not too bad. Only one of them gave me more of a headache. It's called index6.iphoto, and is obviously needed for iPhoto (about 130MB). I do hope that iPhoto will run without it, or can rebuild it.

Working from my own data over the personal and the general Library, I finally came to the System folder. Copying it to the external HD, it stopped for the corrupt ApplicationServices.package. That's a bad thing, I guess. Anyway, my usual replace-it-with-the-last-backup method doesn't work in the system folder. The original got thrown away, but the replacement wasn't copied into its place. Now the computer doesn't start again (I get the screen with the grey apple on light grey background, and the spinning thing underneath, but it goes nowhere from there). So now is the time for a reinstall (I could insert the installation DVD and can start from there). And that's the not so good news.

And following your advice I shouldn't even do that before getting a new HD. :sigh:

The good news in the bad news is that we get a visitor from Germany in January who could bring a new HD (I wouldn't trust any locally bought one).

Still, I may first try to make a complete re-install on my current HD, just as a training exercise. Oh, well, something to do "between the years"...

[Zbond-Zbond]

If you're a registered Macintosh user you can get replacement software from Apple in the U.S.

I've done that in similar situations 1 = got struck by lightning 2 = left start up disks on railway station seat (they were subsequently stolen)

You'd need to phone Apple in California: they're very helpful, and use an internal overnight express worldwide delivery system of some sort. Although they replace exploded, stolen (& probably dropped) items to registered users, they only replace what was registered with them; if you've upgraded you would need to emphasise that fact when speaking to them. They seem to like the word "stolen" more than words like "struck by" and "lightning"
....here is an American phone number (+1) 800 275 2273 (tech support)
....here is another one (+1) 408 996 1010
(+1) = whatever the dialling code is for America
I FOUND THIS APPROACH PRODUCED VERY GOOD SERVICE
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
U.S.A.

and wishing you seasonal greetings for the new year

[Commander McLane]

Thanks, Zbond-Zbond and the rest of you.

Good news: the replacement HD arrived, I put it in, and it works like a charm.

Now since the day before yesterday I am busy re-installing everything (luckily I do have most installation DVDs/CDs). And since yesterday our internet connecion is very busy updating my system and software again (which was the part I wasn't so much looking forward to). More than 1GB of downloading later I am almost finished with it. (Took me about six hours yesterday to download about 800MB of software updates, today it's about 400MB more.)

And then most things will be up-and-running again.

I swear I will never drop my laptop again!

[lfnfan]

When you're done, why not make an image of your Mac's up-to-date OS and software installation.

If you ever need to do a re-install again, it should take about 5 minutes to restore the image plus a short time to apply any new updates, not 500 minutes to start from scratch

[Commander McLane]

I just downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner for exactly that purpose.

[lfnfan]

it really is the way to go. I use clonezilla for my PC - not sure how it would go on a Mac.

The question is, once you have finally updated your laptop and made the image... are you brave enough to do a test restore over your nice new install??

[Commander McLane]

it really is the way to go. I use clonezilla for my PC - not sure how it would go on a Mac.

The question is, once you have finally updated your laptop and made the image... are you brave enough to do a test restore over your nice new install??

To answer this last question: I wasn't yet brave enough for that, but I did the next best thing. First I cloned my internal HD to one partition of the external HD through a file-copy. CCC creates a bootable clone that way. So in the next step I booted from that clone, and then cloned the internal HD to another partition of my external HD through a block-copy (you can't do that while you're booted from the source). It worked. So at least I know that the file-copy clone works. Re-cloning it to an (eventual) new internal HD should then be possible as well. And at the very least I could work completely without my internal HD, just booting from and using the clone.

There is of course one drawback to this whole process, as long as I'm living in remote East Africa: The external HD needs its own power supply. I am not sure what would've happened in case of a power cut while I was booted from it, but I have an idea that it wouldn't have been good. Fortunately during the about 90 minutes it took to do the block-clone power was stable. But I wouldn't want to repeat the process too often, as it would certainly be quite stressfull every time.

[lfnfan]

Nice job commander.

what follows is but friday afternoon digression and rambling. Feel free to ignore.

when I see in your posts about the challenges of living in remote Hacker Outposts, it reminds me not to take for granted such things as uninterrupted power from the wall socket.

But I would have thought that if you had an outage whilst running the os from your external hard drive that it would be just the same as if you had an outage whilst running from the internal hard drive. i.e. just boot it up again and hope it sorts itself out after the restart. I had a bad memory stick in my pc a few months ago, which was causing repeated immediate and unexpected crashes. a bit like pulling the plug out. my pc still restarted every time (although I did end up with a few bad sectors on my HD, and a completely screwed i-tunes library).

In fact the replacement memory is still dodgy, but serviceable, and I can't face forking out another 7 quid to ship the stuff off to the Netherlands for repair/replacement. I am just messing about with the voltages and timings to see if I can get it to behave properly.

I know mac's are different from pc's, but the way I created my OS clone, it is sensitive to drive letter designation. So it falls over if it finds itself on a drive other than C:\ I guess this is not true for you, if you can run the OS from a partition on an external device which - i assume - does not have the same drive letter designation as the original OS install? [\digression]

[Commander McLane]

I know mac's are different from pc's, but the way I created my OS clone, it is sensitive to drive letter designation. So it falls over if it finds itself on a drive other than C:\ I guess this is not true for you, if you can run the OS from a partition on an external device which - i assume - does not have the same drive letter designation as the original OS install?

Indeed, Macs are different. They don't use the typical Windows letter designations at all.

Your boot drive (or partition) simply uses the designation (or mount-point) "/". Every other connected drive uses "/Volumes/name_of_volume" (name_of_volume being a string assigned by the user at formatting or even at a later point; you just need to rename the icon on your desktop). Therefore "/Volumes/Mac Backup" automatically became "/" when I booted from it, and at the same time my internal HD became "/Volumes/Macintosh HD". The only visible difference between working from the internal and the external HD was that the disk icon looks different, and that the USB-HD of course reacts a little slower.