Meredith's iBook recently crashed. This time, the hard drive wouldn't come back for anything. It seems that iBooks don't like water. The iBook made it back from Apple repair in amazing time -- we dropped it off Thursday evening, and it showed up today. While it works, the hard drive was wiped. Didn't even have OS X on it. So it's off to re-install the world...
Getting the backup working was even more of an adventure. We had a backup on an external Firewire drive. So, I plugged it in to my B&W Macintosh ... and the machine froze. OK, reboot, try again ... frozen. Hmm. Reinstall the drivers from the CD that came with the Firewire drive. Oh, now it says 'this disk is bad, would you like to reinitialize?'. Norton didn't even see the drive. This was going from bad to worse. I called Tom and asked if I could come by his house to try his computer. He was happy to try, but his computer didn't even appear to power the drive. Neither of his did, in fact. Maybe the cable is bad? So we went to Apple and tried there. His computer there at least powered the drive, but also reported that it was bad. Half an hour of running Norton Utilities later, the drive was back. He made another copy of the critical files, and I went home. Tom is The Man.
Then I tried plugging the drive in, using a different cable, once more. It froze. OK... turned all the non-Apple extensions off (except for leaving the FW disk driver), then tried again. Again, it reported the disk was bad, but this time my old copy of Norton was able to fix it.
So ... I don't really know what extension I was running that served as 'Corrupt Firewire Drives Extension' ... but at least it works now.
While I appreciate how much better the update process for Mac OS X is than Mac OS 9, I still wish that Apple could get the number of passes down. I think I've gone through four passes now of installing all available updates, rebooting -- and then discovering that the updates I just installed made it possible for me to get to yet another wave of updates.
And so here I sit, reinstalling everything...
Posted by Mike at July 2, 2002 10:55 PM