My Mac has been giving me tons of grief over the last few months. It seems every time I update to the latest and greatest patch, something gets worse on it. So today I decided I would wipe my OS clean and start with the CD that came with my Mac.
For new readers, I purchased my Mac in February of this year, and absolutely loved it. But with every new system update I take, my system becomes more and more unstable, and more and more sluggish. It now crashes once every few days, refuses to come out of sleep, random apps hang, and my new CD burner (which is Mac approved) won’t seem to work when using Lightscribe. In an effort to fix some of these, I’m going to roll the OS back using the installation CDs.
In the footsteps of my pal Rebecca, I’m going to give a play by play of what will undoubtedly be a day filled with frustration. Feel free to keep refreshing — I imagine I’ll be at this for a while.
Rebecca, thinking about reinstalling her OS too. Or maybe she’s just thinking about something else.
11:00am - Wake up
11:30am - Stare at my new CD burner that doesn’t work with my Mac
11:31am - Decide to kill my Mac and start from scratch
11:45am - Email Dale Mugford asking for help unfucking my Mac
11:49am - Dale puts his iPhone down for the first time in weeks and responds. We head over to iChat where he gives me some good advice
12:00pm - Hook up my external hard drive where I normally put all my photos
12:10pm - Install SuperDuper with the intention of backing up my entire hard drive to the external hard drive
12:12pm - SuperDuper complains because my external hard-drive is FAT32. Oops. First brick wall.
12:14pm - Briefly consider reinstalling without a backup, but decide against it due to all the photos I can’t afford to lose
12:30pm - After internet research, I find there’s a command line tool that you can use to resize a partition non-destructively. Very exciting. I type the command line and press return. Curse repeatedly when I see this:
1:00pm - Spent the last 45 minutes clearing space on my Macbook HD so I can move the stuff from my external HD to it. Plan is to reformat the external HD and get rid of the shitty FAT32 file system.
1:05pm - Staring at my diet pepsi, wishing it was booze
1:10pm - Start copying all my data from the external HD to my main drive. Estimated time is 35 minutes. My mind wanders to the crazy german kid video-game video. In particular what I’m going to do to my Mac should this all fail.
1:34pm - Watch crazy german kid video and decide to repost it for everyone’s viewing enjoyment
1:44pm - File copy done. About to reformat external HD.
1:54pm - Format complete. External HD is now a Mac filesystem. Copying files back from my Macbook HD to free some space.
2:01pm - Moving stuff back from main HD to external HD. Another 40 minutes it looks like. Gonna take a quick lunch break.
2:31pm - Had a turkey sandwich with cranberry mayo from the bakery downstairs. Pretty tasty. 8 more minutes of copying left, then I can start the full backup, and then I can reinstall my OS.
2:46pm - Backup in progress. 4GB down, 100GB to go. I think I might go watch some 24 — this is gonna take a while.
3:05pm - Listening to music. Up to 16GB. Been randomly surfing the web — it’s pretty quiet in the blogosphere today.
3:16pm - Just realized I have absolutely no idea where the original installation CDs for my Macbook pro are. Good news is that I found 10 beer in the vegetable crisper in my fridge. How can you tell I’m a bachelor?
3:21pm - Gonna go grab a “vegetable” from my fridge and crack it open. I invite anyone with similar (or vastly different) Mac OSX experiences to post a comment or share your experience
3:47pm - Gonna go grab another beer from the fridge, because the first one was that good. Also, my cell phone has been dead all weekend, so if you’ve called, I’m not ignoring you. I’ll plug it in sometime this week and get back to you.
3:55pm - Backup is about half way. There are 8 more beers in the fridge. Tempting. I remember years ago I went to a Montreal Expos game in Olympic Stadium. Since Bob and I weren’t driving, we came up with some stupid plan to drink at least one beer per inning. Unfortunately, the game went 14 innings, and Bob and I were completely wasted (having actual had one beer per inning). I’m surprised Chuck even bothered to give us a ride back to Ottawa.
Still Going
4:29pm - Backups sure do take a long fucking time. I’m getting bored. Although, I am listening to music, which is a nice change from the normal.
4:47pm - Beer #3 is about to fall.
5:30pm - Jesus. This is taking FOREVER. Good news is the backup is almost done, and then I can start restoring. I’ve also made DVDs of the recent photoshoots/weddings I’ve done just to make sure there’s 0% chance I can lose those.
10:10pm - Backup done, but I got side tracked with beer, facebook messages, and lifestream changes.
i just want to sit around and make that face allllll day - THAT would be super duper…
4
Hesty October 14th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Eh, I’m sure you mean Montreal Expos if you’re talking about innings. :) Anyway, the most you can have is only 9 beer, how bad can that be? So how does the re-install working out? No update for the last few hours, this is not good.
5
Eva October 14th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Are you sure you only had the 2 beers when you wrote that? It’s the Montreal Expos, not the Canadiens! ;-)
6
Duane Storey October 14th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Wow..You guys are right..
7
Tom October 14th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
So….how’s it going?
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Duane Storey October 15th, 2007 at 9:44 am
And Tod, the version I have can backup to a disk image file on the device, which is the route I’m taking.
9
dale October 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
After doing the first full backup with superduper, you then just run the smartupdate backup, which modifies the backup to match your hd. Takes 5-10 minutes on average.
I’m writing this of course from my iphone, jackass.
1. Thanks for the SuperDuper trick re: the disk image. I’m afraid, though, because it asks me to confirm that it’s going to ERASE the disk image (which is weird because it hasn’t created one yet). Does it mean that it’s going to erase the drive?
2. What plugin are you using to get the icons/photos beside people’s comments in the, er, comments. It is teh rad! :-\
12
Duane Storey October 16th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
It’s just based on gravatars.com or whatever. Look for a wordpress gravatar plugin and grab that. If you can’t find one, email me and I’ll send you mine.
Hang in there buddy, you’re almost done.
I really want to use SuperDuper, but I think it only does mirror images. I’ve got a 1 TB drive and it seems a waste to turn it into a 120GB drive.
Incidentally, you haven’t seen Crazy German Kid until you’ve seen Crazy German Kid and Numa Numa Guy mashed up: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5757589301575990931
i just want to sit around and make that face allllll day - THAT would be super duper…
Eh, I’m sure you mean Montreal Expos if you’re talking about innings. :) Anyway, the most you can have is only 9 beer, how bad can that be? So how does the re-install working out? No update for the last few hours, this is not good.
Are you sure you only had the 2 beers when you wrote that? It’s the Montreal Expos, not the Canadiens! ;-)
Wow..You guys are right..
So….how’s it going?
And Tod, the version I have can backup to a disk image file on the device, which is the route I’m taking.
After doing the first full backup with superduper, you then just run the smartupdate backup, which modifies the backup to match your hd. Takes 5-10 minutes on average.
I’m writing this of course from my iphone, jackass.
Good luck with the reinstall.
This was actually kind of interesting. And I don’t like long posts.
Hey… two questions:
1. Thanks for the SuperDuper trick re: the disk image. I’m afraid, though, because it asks me to confirm that it’s going to ERASE the disk image (which is weird because it hasn’t created one yet). Does it mean that it’s going to erase the drive?
2. What plugin are you using to get the icons/photos beside people’s comments in the, er, comments. It is teh rad! :-\
It’s just based on gravatars.com or whatever. Look for a wordpress gravatar plugin and grab that. If you can’t find one, email me and I’ll send you mine.
Hey dude, at least you don’t run a lawnmower.