laptop go boom?
Wed, Jun 15, 2005I'm sitting at my parent's place downloading the solaris 10 dvd iso, when low and behold my mac freezes. I've got a moving mouse, and no functionality. So I figure, what the heck lets see if sleep will actually work. It just powered off. At that point I'm thinking that I've experienced another in a line of rare crashes. Nope. When I attempt to boot the laptop all I got was the nice little grey apple screen. At first I thought maybe it was replaying the hfs+ journal, but after 5-10 minutes that was no longer a valid reason. I restarted in verbose mode (hold [apple?] V at power on), and noticed that accounts were missing (like root...). Now when I see anything regarding missing files and netinfo not able to start i freak, as anyone should.
Now if I didn't have access to another mac at home things would've gotten MUCH more complicated (or simpler depending on your point of view as I would've immediately started reformatting). Thanks to my girlfriend's mac I was able to access my laptop using target disk mode (firewire disk mode, hold [apple?] T at power on) and discover that /Users was empty. What's more interesting was the fact that the disk usage had not changed, so the inodes were allocated but not accessable. fsck_hfs proved to be quite useless, failing due to an invalid inode entry (which I would hope a sane fsck would be able to fix, hell ext3 and reiser will go to the ends of the earth to recover data why shouldn't hfs+ for fucks sake its journaled). I contacted a friend who had a copy of Drive 10, which sat and spun for 2.5 days before telling me it couldn't do anything but unlink the files (I'm not really down with kissing my homedir goodbye yet). Currently I'm trying Data Rescue which is more userfriendly than Drive 10 which was chock full of usefull messages like "Working" (which it displayed for 8 hours). Hopefully I will be able to recover my homedir, I do have everything backed up on various formats in different places but I want my current data. I feel oddly like a fish swimming against the current, everything is telling me to just reformat the damned laptop and move on, but I'm just too damned stubbon. At leasted I'm learning a bit about catastrophic failure handling on macos. Oh and btw so far I've seen firewire disk mode CRASH once, which is a bit disturbing as I don't think its doing anything other than providing hardware access to the disk.
note: to access firewire disk mode when you are in openfirmware
dev /firewire-disk-mode target-modeThat and more interesting firewire/security related items are here.
<update>After checking the disk again in diskutility it came up with a smart failure. So I guess the drive is no more. I've contacted apple and my laptop is en route to them for a drive replacement. </update>