[Ham-Mac] How to Screw up your HD

[David Allred]

Nice save, Dick.
You're not that dumb: you have a full backup.

Hitting the panic button is a fairly common response to what might  
appear to be a freeze. And just letting the Mac puzzle things out for  
itself doesn't seem natural to most folks that have worked with  
systems other than OS X.

You could have done much worse:

A user at one of my client sites panicked when her G5 suddenly ran  
the fans at full speed. She thought it was going to "blow up" and  
unplugged it.

Well, that's not so bad: OS X is pretty good at recovering all by  
itself from a "power failure."

This would be a boring story if she had stopped there. She didn't.

She plugged it back in and hit the go button. It chimed, booted, and  
started testing and repairing files (from the journaling). It also  
ran the fans at full speed again.

Yup, you guessed it. She pulled the plug again.

OS X can almost always self-recover from one "power outage," but a  
second whack in the head while it is repairing files from the first  
whack in the head usually results in file damage. It quit booting  
after that.

I had to do a full restore from the Automatic Data Recovery System.


And the next time you are looking for them, the secret startup keys  
are closer than you might imagine.

It's really easy to forget that the built in Mac Help really works.  
All of the common magic startup sequence keys are listed in the  
"Shortcuts for starting up"the  Mac help section of Help. A search in  
Help from the Finder for "startup" found the relevant page on the  
first try.

73,
David
N1EXQ

      |  J. David Allred
      |
      |  P H O T O N
      |
      |  allred at photoninc.com
      |  Photon, Inc.
      |  617-661-9046
      |  www.photoninc.com



On Mar 15, 2006, at 12:34 PM, Dick Kriss, AA5VU wrote:

> I did something really dumb this morning and finally recovered.  I  
> was in
> iPhoto selecting five pictures to drag copy to a compact flash  
> card.  I used
> the Select All command and started the copy.   Something did not  
> look right
> then I realized I was in my Library rather than an Album folder and  
> iPhoto
> was copying my whole library of photos to the desktop because I  
> messed up
> dragging them to CF card.  The G4 was going crazy so I hit the  
> panic button
> the front to force a restart.  It restarted but OSX 10.4.5 could  
> not mount
> the desktop.  I had and endless spinning disc.
>
> I could not remember the keyboard combination to force the machine  
> to boot
> from another drive so I messed around with until I could get the  
> DVD drive
> open to be able to insert and boot from the OSX 10.4 startup disc.   
> Finally
> got it to boot and used the Startup option to boot from my Backup  
> HD.  It
> worked find the recovery was to trash the Desktop file from the  
> Primary
> drive and replace it with a copy from the Backup drive.  I did not  
> want to
> do full backup from the backup because I did not want to lose some  
> new stuff
> that was not backed up.  I then had to use the Disc Utility to  
> mount the
> Primary drive so it could be selected as the startup drive. While I  
> had the
> Disc Utility open I repaired the primary drive.  It all worked and  
> I am now
> back on the Primary HD. Humpty-Dumpty is back together again.
>
> The moral to this shaggy-dog story is NEVER use the iPhoto Select  
> All if you
> are in the Library.  Everything is now working great thanks to  
> Carbon Copy
> Cloner and having a good backup drive.
>
> I was trying to do too many things at the same time really messed up.
>
> TNX for reading
>
> 73, Dick AA5VU
>
>
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