The northlondonhippy

(The fol­low­ing is not an April Fools spoof post. That sort of child­ish behav­iour is well behind me)

Like hello and what­not. And ting. See, I’m down with the kids, innit.

For a change, I have a legit­i­mate excuse for not post­ing any­thing here, my iMac died, twice.

I’ll spare you the tech bull­shit and briefly sum up; the hard drive died, it went off to be repaired, it came back, the hard drive died again 8 hours later. It went back for a 2nd repair, this time the drive was wiped, but still work­ing. It came back, the restore process was a mess, it took 3 days of fix­ing to get it back work­ing properly.

Deal­ing with Apple and their autho­rised repair cen­tre was straight­for­ward and easy, and here’s a help­ful tip: Always get the Apple Care on your Macs. Always. One seri­ous prob­lem or repair, it will more than pay for itself. With the prob­lems I’ve had, it has saved me a fortune.

My cur­rent iMac is my third in the last 6 years, an 18 month old, 27” quad core LED screened beast and hadn’t given me any trou­ble till now, but when it died, it really died, while I was using it. I watched as icons dropped off my desk­top, ques­tion marks appeared on the appli­ca­tion icons in the dock, and run­ning apps froze. I tried to restart my machine and when I did, the boot up screen showed noth­ing but a file folder icon with a ques­tion mark on it.

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

I hope you never, ever see the dreaded, hor­ri­ble, ques­tion mark-file folder boot screen icon and may god have mercy on your soul if you don’t have Apple Care.

I phoned Apple, who con­firmed what I sus­pected, most likely the inter­nal drive had failed. They asked if I had a back-up. I did, but it was 2 weeks old.

My bad, I only con­nected my Time Machine drive when the reminder came up, every 10 days — I had ignored it a few days before. Very stu­pid and les­son learned, my Time Machine drive is now always on and always connected.

This all hap­pened on a Sat­ur­day and I had to wait until Mon­day for the repair shop to phone to arrange col­lec­tion. They could have done it on the same day, ie the Mon­day, but it wasn’t pos­si­ble on my part.

Long story short, they swapped out the dead drive for a new one, rein­stalled the OS and tested every­thing. It was deliv­ered back to me early the next week.

I was very happy to have it back and set about restor­ing every­thing from my Time Machine drive, which I was able to do, and I then began to fill in the gaps between my last back-up and the day of the crash, ie about a 2 week period of loss.

I was able to retrieve some recently pur­chased music via iTunes Home Share from another Mac of mine and I emailed myself all of the pho­tos I last imported from my iPhone, then reim­ported them into iPhoto. I keep a lot of my cur­rent doc­u­ments on iDisk, so they were eas­ily obtained as well. I didn’t lose any impor­tant data, I was lucky.

I pur­chased two appli­ca­tions from the Mac App Store that I had to rein­stall, though tech­ni­cally one of them was being installed at the time of the first hard drive crash. Can you guess where this is going?

When my hard drive died the first time, I was installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. Its a hefty 4.5gb down­load and it was tak­ing ages. The first thing I noticed as my sys­tem came apart at the seams was that the instal­la­tion appeared to stall.

I was only installing it so I could acti­vate the new mul­ti­touch ges­tures on my iPad, which requires Xcode 4 to put the device into devel­oper mode. That’s it, a very lame reason.

I started to rein­stall Xcode 4 on my repaired iMac, only this time, instead of doing the Mac App Store magic, it down­loaded the installer pack­age to my Appli­ca­tions Folder. I ran the installer and watched as it froze at about the same point it did before…and then my fold­ers and icons started van­ish­ing from my desktop.

Every­thing stopped work­ing, I restarted the machine and low and behold, I was star­ing at the ques­tion mark-file folder boot icon again.

Apple arranged to have it col­lected again the fol­low­ing day, as a pri­or­ity repair. Once the engi­neer had an ini­tial look, he phoned me and said he was able to rein­stall the OS and could see that the user data was gone. He said he would test the hard­ware and let me know the results, but on ini­tial inspec­tion, every­thing seemed fine.

Indeed it was, and after full and exten­sive test­ing, the machine was returned to me and this is where the real fun began.

I restored from my backup and this time it wasn’t as smooth. There must have been rem­nants of the pre­vi­ous restora­tion, because my Home Folder and login name changed, with a num­ber ”1” added to them, the sys­tem cre­ated a new iden­tity for me, con­structed from all my old files. I didn’t lose any data, what I lost were per­mis­sions and privileges.

There’s a rel­a­tively easy fix for this, via Disk Util­ity and the Repair Per­mis­sions com­mand, but that can only get you so far if you are booted up from the inter­nal drive. To really fix it, plus run the Repair Disk com­mand, you need to boot from the OS X instal­la­tion DVD. Boot­ing from that DVD is a very basic part of trou­bleshoot­ing and guess what, I couldn’t do it.

I tried every pos­si­ble way to boot from the DVD, I even spent nearly an hour on the phone with Apple try­ing to trou­bleshoot it. I just wasn’t able to get it to work. I could read the DVD, have the sys­tem recog­nise it as a bootable drive, I could even start the soft­ware on it to the point where it needs to restart and then zip, noth­ing, the DVD would spin for a bit, then stop, while I got no fur­ther than the Apple Logo boot screen.

I cloned the install disk to a flash drive, that didn’t work either. With help from Apple, I booted the iMac into tar­get disk mode, con­nected it to my lap­top via FireWire, but Repair Per­mis­sions was greyed out. I was able to run Repair Disk though.

The Apple guy (who was great, patient and very help­ful) said that I had 2 choices, send it off for another repair or he could send me a replace­ment installer DVD. His view was that if my install DVD was cor­rupted, that could be why it kept hang­ing when try­ing to boot and he also spec­u­lated that the same cor­rupt nugget of data was stop­ping the flash drive in the same place in the process. It made sense, was I decided to try the new DVD option, even though it would take a week to receive it in the post. Bet­ter that than box­ing it up again and hav­ing it gone for another week.

I thanked the Apple guy and felt dejected. And then I had another idea, I used SuperDuper to clone my entire inter­nal drive to an exter­nal, bootable, FireWire drive. It took 4 hours to copy over nearly 400gb of data, but in the end I was able to boot up my iMac using the FireWIre drive.

So my iMac is work­ing, my inter­nal drive is not mounted, I dove straight for Disk Util­ity. Repair Per­mis­sions was not greyed out, so I clicked on it and let it do its magic. This time, it ran for lit­er­ally ages and I could see it repair­ing count­less files and fold­ers. At the end of the process, I rebooted back to the inter­nal drive and waited to see if I could access every­thing with admin­is­tra­tor privileges.

I could. It worked. Happy days.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t boot from the DVD, but could read the DVD oth­er­wise and won’t know until the replace­ment DVD appears. If I can’t boot from it, it will have to go off for a 3rd repair, but if I can boot from it, I’m laughing.

But what about the ini­tial prob­lem and the sub­se­quent sec­ond prob­lem, both iden­ti­cal from my point of view?

I think in the first instance, they might have replaced my hard drive for no rea­son, on the basis that the paper­work instructed them to do so, rather than test­ing it to see if it would work again with a rein­stall. I don’t know this for sure, but I think its likely that the drive was only wiped.

The more thor­ough test­ing dur­ing the sec­ond repair revealed the drive was wiped and since the symp­toms of both crashes were the same, I am guess­ing every­thing else was the same too, but again its only a guess.

So what caused both problems?

The only com­mon vari­able in both sce­nar­ios is the instal­la­tion of Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. It can’t be a coin­ci­dence that it was being installed both times the hard drive went ka-blooey.

I men­tioned this to the help­ful Apple guy, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve searched on Google, I can’t find any­one else who has had a sim­i­lar prob­lem, but some­times things con­flict, soft­ware anom­alies hap­pen and they are not widespread.

Could I repro­duce this a third time? I don’t know and I’m not going to find out by try­ing to install Xcode 4 again. I don’t even want a 3 quid refund from Apple.

I just want my com­puter back…and I think I have it back now, but I’m not con­vinced just yet.

My iMac is the cen­tre of my life. That may seem like an over­state­ment, but actu­ally its not.

To say I have been a bit depressed by all this, now that would be an under­state­ment. I’ve lost sleep, hon­est to god, lost sleep from the stress of all of this.

If you don’t relate to tech and a dig­i­tal lifestyle, I’ll try to put it in a per­spec­tive you might appreciate:

The most expen­sive thing I own is my house.

The sec­ond most expen­sive thing I own is my car.

The third most expen­sive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expen­sive thing I own died.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was put in a box and taken away by a stranger, twice.

The third most expen­sive thing I own spent the bet­ter part of 2 and 1/2 weeks, away from me.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was my only access to a life time’s worth of pho­tos, all irreplaceable.

You get the idea.

My iMac is my work­sta­tion, my pow­er­house for dig­i­tal heavy lift­ing, the cen­tre­piece of all my high tech kit and it was out of the pic­ture for nearly 3 weeks.

No joke, I had the same sick in the pit of my stom­ach feel­ing I’ve had when some­one close to me has died.

Now that I have solved the major issues with my iMac, I’m try­ing to con­vince myself its back for good. Its a trust issue thing and clearly my toys and I enjoy an unnat­u­rally close relationship.

And I said I wasn’t get too tech­ni­cal. Oooops

Update: Found THIS THREAD on the Apple Sup­port Dis­cus­sion Board, with many peo­ple who had exactly the same prob­lems with Xcode 4 instal­la­tion wip­ing their drive.

(If you’ve found this page because you sus­pect you’ve had prob­lems result­ing from try­ing to install Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, I really want to hear from you. Please email me, my address is northlondonhippy@gmail.com)