My internal hard drive took a dive Friday. Things got slow, I had to power down, and then OS X wouldn’t boot. Between then and now, I’ve learned a lot about OS X and Time Machine. And the whole process just underscores a well-known computing joke: “There are two types of drives; those that have crashed, and those that will.”
Time Machine, the automated backup software that is included with OS X, is pretty cool. But I found myself in a bind, because the last Time Machine backup I had to work with was from noon on a day when I worked until five.[1] So there was a very big gap of time in which I had been highly productive (on a Friday, even! Take note, current and future employers!). Naturally, I wanted to nab those files before I started any sort of restoration process.[2]
As usual, AskMe came to my rescue. I posted a question and someone there turned me onto the ditto command and to how OS X specifies the location of drives. I was able to boot from the OS X installation DVD, fire up a terminal, and copy the files I had created to a USB jump drive. Then I reinstalled OS X. When the installation finished (and it took quite a long time), it asked me if I wanted to start fresh or start with a Time Machine backup. I went with the Time Machine backup, and the migration assistant started on its journey. It was late, so I let it run overnight.
When I woke up the next morning, the file transfer dialog’s status bar was almost all the way across. A status message told me it was “Transferring files to support applications” and that it had about three minutes left. Good enough, I thought, and went about my day. I kept checking on it, but it never changed. I was reluctant to coldcock[3] the machine, as I suspect one too many improper shutdowns (i.e. Haden + power strip + pretty light on power strip) had been the cause of the hard drive issues in the first place.[4] So, I let it run until about eight o’clock that evening.
Some web research convinced me that my machine had zombied out, and that I might have better luck booting from the DVD and restoring from Time Machine via its utilities menu, instead of via the migration assistant.[5] Alas, the first stab at that (which took several hours to run) failed to produce a bootable system. (I, again, found myself staring at the grey screen of death.) So, I tried it again, this time rolling back to the penultimate Time Machine backup. Luckily, that one took. And, though I composed this on my backup machine, I’m happy to be posting it from my beloved iMac.
Notes
1. I have no clue why Time Machine stopped backing up. I suspect that the internal hard drive issue was to blame–that it was trying to back up something incurably broken.
2. I booted from the OS X installation DVD and ran Disc Utility, which fixed some errors with my hard drive, but I still couldn’t boot.
3. I don’t know why all of my metaphors for computing are violent. My favorite phrase for using very powerful and complicated software for a simple task is that it is “too much gun for the job.”
4. Note to self: buy an uninterruptible power supply.
5. It should go without saying that, at many stages in this process, I was feverishly researching all manner of solutions, using both my iPod touch and my wife’s ancient Dell laptop (Inspiron 5100, 2.40GHz Pentium 4, 384MB RAM) that we haven’t used in months because, after having become accustomed to the iMac, it feels about as modern as one of those newfangled electronic calculators we had as kids with the LED display.