Marshall's Weblog

Well…. I am temporarilly without my Powerbook. You see, I was opening up Automator to try to create a New File action, similar to any other respectable operating system, so that I could ctrl-click on a Finder window and create a New File. As soon as I clicked on the New Automator Action from the menu, the hard drive started thrashing. I figured it was loading up Automator, but after about a minute of waiting, I tried to click onto the Dock to kill it. It was then that I discovered that the Dock wasnt responding, and neither was anything else but the mouse. The hard drive had stopped, so I figured I would just power it off and reboot…

Rebooting, turns out, would not be such a simple process. After letting it try to boot for about 10 minutes, I hit the power button again to restart the damn thing. I did this 5 or 6 times and nothing past the gray boot screen would display. So I found the keystroke for booting into verbose mode (hold command + V before you press power) and found out my disk was fucked. The boot process was spewing a bunch of “file system is readonly” messages. I tried booting into the Tiger DVD a few times and attempting to use Disk Utility to repair the drive. It would repair it, but then attempt a second Verification pass and would hang. Again, my impatientness got the best of me and I quit it a few times without determining if it would actually finish.

All I wanted to do was copy my Digital Pictures so that they did not get lost, really, there isnt too much on my laptop that I would miss besides those pictures. Finally, after almost throwing down $80 on DiskWarrior, and attempting a Gentoo LiveCD to repair the drive, I went back to this page to see if there were any boot options that I may have missed. I found Single User Mode, and said, WTF, what could I lose at this point. Single User Mode boots up to a bash prompt and lets me at least see my files on the file system. I was then able to mount my external Firewire drive and copy my files onto it so that I can wipe the drive clean and start from scratch. Happy Day! (Actually, this is still going on right now)

What is most ironic about this whole situation is that I wanted to backup my files and reinstall the OS from scratch anyways. Last night I had an inkling to backup my home directory, but chose to ignore the voices in my head to do so. Out of sheer luck, this came back to bite me in the ass.

So what did we learn today??? Always keep backups. And never use Automator.

Update: Well, the drive is, at least, partially dead. It will not repair itself, it will not allow me to modify the partition table, nothin’. I am heading out to Best Buy after work today to pick up a new hard drive and attempt some surgery on the Powerbook later tonight