Mac Crash
September 9th, 2007
Last Monday night, I returned from a Labor Day vacation in Tahoe. Before I went to bed, I ran a full backup of my MacBook Pro using SuperDuper (I try to back up my Mac once a week in the event of a crash). When I woke up Tuesday morning, I tried to quit SuperDuper but it appeared frozen. I then tried to shut down the computer but the entire operating system appeared frozen (the mouse still moved but nothing would respond). So, I forced a power off by holding down the power button. When I powered the computer back on, all I got was a gray screen with a blinking folder icon with a question mark in the middle. My Mac was hosed!
After work on Tuesday, I took my MacBook Pro to the Genius Bar at the Apple store. The Genius took a look at it for about two minutes and then told me that the computer was no longer under warranty (it had been a year and two months since I bought it) and that the problem was most likely with the hard drive or the logic board. He said if it was a hard drive problem, it would be much cheaper to have it fixed by a local repair shop than send it Apple and referred me to a local Apple-certified repair shop. I took my lifeless Mac in the next morning and a few hours later, they had a new hard drive in it.
When I got home, I installed the operating system from the original install DVDs and then went to find my SuperDuper drive image on an external hard drive. At first, I was a little confused how to restore the image and it took me a little while to realize I had to boot into the OS installer and then open Disk Utility from there. However, when I opened Disk Utility from the install DVD, I wasn’t able to drag the drive image (the user interface requires you to drag the image, there’s no other way to select it). After searching around for a bit online (I luckily had my work laptop with me), I found out that there’s a bug in Disk Utility on some of the OS X Install DVDs. Luckily I know my way around the command line so I opened the terminal and used Apple’s asr to restore the drive image using the command asr restore -s
The restore took about an hour and a half and when it finished, I rebooted my Mac and the OS immediately loaded. I’ve been using the restored image for a week now and everything seems to have worked perfectly with the backup and restore except for some font caching issues which were easy to clean up using Yasu.
I’m just glad that the backup and restore process worked so flawlessly. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Back up your computer often!
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