I thought I lost a hard drive last night. EQ wouldn't load, so I figured that a reboot might clean up a graphics problem and let it work. (This happens, though infrequently.) Since my G4 died a while back, I also figured that while I had it down, I'd plug the old Cinema Display into it, and run the G5 with dual monitors.
After making that change, it wouldn't boot up.
On restarting, the system would get to the Apple logo, and the spinner. And stay there. Forever.
I thought it was a hard drive failure, but when I installed OS X on a different volume and booted from it, I was able to copy data off the drive just fine. To the tune of nearly 200 Gig of data off it. This would not generally be how partially failed drives work. So I figured I'd try and recover the drive, and see what happened.
Diskutil saw errors on the disk, but was unable to fix them. Even though Apple says you should always use diskutil for disk problems, I was going to need something else. So I booted into single-user mode, and did an fsck on the drive. One pass was enough to totally fix it. The resulting "DamagedFiles" directory held a lot of stuff. Stuff with names that were scary. Like "Appletalk". And "login". The system log file held a lot of errors about both of those subsystems.
Of course, it still wouldn't boot from that drive. So I did an installation, with the "Archive and Install" option, that saves all the user and application data. Basically, it saves all info from the running system, plus the applications it isn't installing as part of it's install.
Everquest won't run now. Lightroom won't either. iTunes refuses to admit my iPhone is attached to the machine now. (Maybe it isn't, but I think it is.) Who knows what else is screwed up. All the stuff I care about, however, is backed up. The photo archives are on two disks, and CDs. All the crucial documents are all on my iDisk as well as the boot drive that failed.
What a PITA.
I guess when I get Leopard, I'll probably do a complete, fresh, installation of it, just to clean all this up.
I'm moving. I signed a new lease for a one-bedroom apartment in trendy DUMBO, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. My new lease starts Nov 15th.
Bought it last night at CompUSA, when I picked up another MacBook Pro power brick.
I have no intention of installing it on my laptop, or my home machine for that matter, until some problems are resolved with it. Probably around the time 10.5.1. comes out.
So far, all the in-depth reviews are treating it well, it seems. The underpinnings are improved, but the actual interface is a step back in usability.