Lost Day
I spent yesterday rebuilding and repairing my main desktop Mac. Fingers crossed. It may be fixed now. It seems to have had some pretty serious volume structure problems on the main disk. The Finder kept hanging, and every time I did something that touched every file on the disk (like backing up) the process would hang. I had to boot off another disk to fix it, which meant I had to find my Tiger DVD and remember some old passwords. And then there was lot of time waiting around while files copied, Tiger installed, and TechTool tried to repair things. In any case it was quite boring and not very productive. I did catch up on my comic books though.
I let TechTool Deluxe run overnight and it found some more problems that it offered to repair. (Disk Utility doesn’t see any problems though.) However it warned me that some of the fixes were unusual so I pressed the cancel button instead of the repair button to take a closer look at them, and TechTool canceled right back to the start. If I want to see the fixes again or decide to apply them I have to run another two hour verification session. Very bad user interface!
One useful thing I learned: if you have a current AppleCare contract you can download the latest TechTool Deluxe from Apple (though this is not as up-to-date as the current TechTool Pro 4.5 from Micromat, which you have to purchase). You don’t have to use the out-of-date CD they sent you when you signed up.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:37 PM
Next time, boot up into “Single User Mode” by restarting and immediately pressing cmd + s. You are in Darwing. Run the file system check utility (instructions will be printed on booting into Single User Mode, but basically, at the prompt enter “fsck -fy /”. Run that a couple of times. When you get a clean volume, reboot into aqua again (type “reboot”) and run the repair permissions routine on Disk Utility. Most of the time this will get you out of the deep water and into a depth TTPro will easily fix.