Actually the computer woke up on the wrong side of the bed and has been doing so for a while.

My PowerBook has a problem. It has always had this problem. It doesn't wake from sleep very well in the morning. Every day when I leave the office I unplug the power close the lid put the computer in its bag ad head home. I get home, open the laptop and and the airport card discovers the wireless network and I'm happily online.

In the morning I unplug the power, close the lid and pack it in the bag. I get to work, open the lid - and crash. Sometimes it was just frozen in place, other times it was a full blown kernel panic. In any case it meant a forced shutdown and restart.

It was hard to resist the pull of anthropomorphism. I couldn't help but wonder what was the source of the computer's aversion to going to work in the morning. I suspected that maybe I wasn't being the best role model in that regard. There are probably many mornings that I have no desire to wake up and go to the office and actually work.

There was an obvious work-around. I could have shut the computer down gone the office and started it up. I was going to have to restart it anyway. But that wasn't good enough. This was supposed to work. I had a overwhelming need to figure out why it didn't, and all resources I could find both inside and outside of Apple were of no help.

The most obvious target was networking. At home I'm wireless, at work I'm plugged into the wall. So I started fiddling with the settings. Turning Airport off before going to the office didn't help. Turning off the auto-discovery and manually switching from one network to the other - no help.

I started playing with other settings. Normally the screen brightness automatically adjusts to ambient light. I turned this feature off. It didn't help.

I tried plugging in the network and the power before opening the computer - crash.

I knew all of theses crashes and forced shutdowns were wreaking havoc with the drive. I had already had to rebuild the drive once because it was becoming very unstable. Prudence would have dictated giving up and and just doing the orderly shut down. But all the work files were being backed up daily. I don't take dictation. And who the hell is Prudence to tell me what to do?

I was reading an email Wednesday when Apple's multi-lingual screen of death appeared. It tells you in seven different languages that you need to do a forced shutdown and restart. So I did the shutdown. There was no re-start. For an interesting twist, I did not have a copy of the OS X 10.4 install disc that had the utilities that would fix the problem. Using the 10.3 utilities on a 10.4 system was only going to make things worse. I did have a disc image of the install - on my hard drive. So here's what I did.

Boot off the 10.3 cd and install on the external FireWire drive.

Boot from the FireWire drive and burn a 10.4 install disc.

Boot from the 10.4 disc and run the utilities. Unfortunately the system and the directory structures were so screwed up they couldn't help. So on to plan B. Do an archive and install and put a new system on the disc. But the disc was too far gone.

Plan C. Reboot off the firewire and copy over my user folder and any applications and support files I couldn't easily replace. Reboot off the 10.4 disc reformat the disc and start from scratch. and not just a simple re-fromat either do the whole write zeros to the disc thing just make sure it's completely clean. I also figured that if there were any physical defects on the drive this would reveal them. But it went smoothly.

Then it was time to go home. So I shut down and went home and re-installed 10.4. Then I plugged in the FireWire drive to start the rebuilding process. I dragged the contents of the old user folder into the new one and what took over an hour to copy earlier in the day took about three seconds. It was a good minute before I could remember to breathe again. Then I opened the folder called "Work." Inside were all of the folders for each category of project, just like they were when I checked the copy before zeroing the drive. Those folders were empty. The folders on the FireWire drive were empty too.

Also missing my iTunes music folder and my iPhoto library. The Music I can recover off the iPod, the work files are backed up, the photos are gone forever.

This morning I went to work and started the process of recovering files from the tape library. Every tape that the little robot mechanism put into the tape drive read as "erased." So the back up in broken. Its either a read error or the damn thing is actually erasing out tapes. Bottom line is. The files are with the photos.

The only vague hint of the tiniest possibility of any hope that there is the most minute silver lining to all of this is that it is the slow part of the year for me. I only had about a dozen active jobs. Two months ago that number was over 100.

I now officially don't care why the system won't wake up from sleep when I get the office but seems to be fine when I go home. No more sleep for me. Just a complete shutdown.

And a bit of work to do over.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 06:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment