Okay, my previous post about my Time Machine experience was premature. Though I was able to install what seemed like a stable system from one of my Time Machine backups, rebooting is still a problem. I can sometimes boot into Safe Mode, but a regular boot is out of the question. I attempted to create a new Time Machine backup (of the restored system, to an old USB2 hard drive that I hadn’t been using for anything) and it crawled to a halt. So something is deeply wrong, either with the internal hard drive itself, or with the buses. I’ll be on the phone with Apple today. We’ll see what happens.
Since I’m up, at least in safe mode, I’d like to copy my iPhoto Library to something. It’s about 45GB, which rules out burning to DVD or uploading over the web. I think I’ll pick up a new drive today and copy it to that, just for safe keeping. All this hard drive instability makes me nervous as hell.
I had HD issues on my macbook pro for many months that caused me much pain. I haven’t read your entire blog about your HD issues, but from what I have read sounds similar to my problems.
I have been using Apple products since 2002 but since Jan 2008 I’ve been exclusively mac. While there are lots of really good things about this, I have discovered that HD issues make apple products act REALLY weird. I’m kind of a computer guy and have seen HD problems over the years but the manner in which my macbook pro failed was completely odd. It started with an upgrade from 10.3.x to 10.3.x+1 or something. It’s weird because it ran fine on one version but when I’d do the combo update the machine would puke, blue screen, run for a while then lock up etc. I had to rebuild/reload the OS etc multiple times and it would continue to happen. I’d skip a release then load the next in a month or 2 and it would work and sometime fail. fsck etc never showed any HD problems; disk util never complained, surface scans were OK. It was maddening and I was really busy and my machine went out of warranty so i just limped along. What was weird is that I could run 10.3.x or previous versions and it ran like a champ. I argued with the genius bar people about it and they said it was a drive problem. I asked why disk util never showed any issues and why did it run fine up until 10.3.x. They couldn’t answer me but just said “it’s a drive issue”.
I eventually bought a new HD back in March (http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=208270281) and with my new torx wrenches and the help of a youtube video I installed it. Since then, I have had no issues and my machine performs MUCH better plus I have more than double the space. (320G vs 160G OEM)
Anyway, I hope you get it worked out; It’s a real headache dealing with drive issues.
db
Things did eventually work out. I did a followup post on it. Apple replaced the internal hard drive, I was able to restore from Time Machine using the Migration Assistant. I bought a new Seagate 500GB external USB2 drive and started a new Time Machine backup from scratch. I still have the original Time Machine drive, in case I find that something is missing. But, so far, outside of a few application reinstalls, it’s been painless. My photos are intact. I haven’t (knock wood) lost any data.
Evidently, from what I’ve read, Disk Utility isn’t that great at picking up on disk problems, except for fairly minor ones. I’ve heard Disk Warrior is the thing to have, and I guess I should pony up for it.
I’ve also been testing out some off-site/online backup services, as a last-ditch bit of insurance in case of utter catastrophe. I’m paranoid as hell when it comes to losing data. And I trust hard drives about as far as I can throw them. So I’m finally trying to get my act entirely together and have redundant backups of everything.