I returned home from the Nats game tonight and sat down at my Mac mini to check email and enter some mileage data at BikeJournal.
It froze.
I forced it to shutdown, waited a few seconds, then restarted. The Mac chimed, the screen turned on…
….and there was the blinking-question-mark folder.
Wha?
I tried restarting again – same result.
#@$^@&!
So I boot from the system DVD and run Disk Utility on the HD. It finds numerous missing threads, incorrect file counts, and even a missing (or corrupted) master directory block.
Not good.
Disk Utility tries its best to repair the disk. It succeeds with the MDB, but with little else. So, swallowing my pride, I reformatted the drive and am reinstalling the OS.
A lot of things are on an external drive – most notably my iTunes library.
What did I lose? Email, and iPhoto stuff, most of which is backed up on other computers. And I lost my master mileage chart for 2006.
Ugh.
Fortunately, I have the total miles for each week written down, and have the major rides entered on this blog. But it’s a nuisance. I’m gonna take the Mac to the Apple Store this weekend to see what can be done to remedy the situation.
forepac
25 May 2006 — 01:33
No! That stinks! So sorry to hear that. Also nervous, given that I just bought a new MacBook – here’s hoping that it’s not a widespread Apple problem. Have you checked the boards to see if other users have had similar HD problems in their new Minis? Keep us posted, and let me know if there’s anything I can help you recover.
Grand Poobah
25 May 2006 — 01:40
Well, I’m back up and running on the mini right now. And I found backup data for about 90 percent of my riding log, which is a big relief.
If anything, the freshly-reminted mini is a lot faster without the extra kruft I transferred over from the iMac. Of course, i’ve yet to reinstall Office or Photoshop, so…. who knows. I’ll keep an eye on it and see what transpires.