Timbru

This was a serious crash on a one week old MacBook.

I was setting up the trial version of Parallels Desktop to make it work with the Boot Camp partition.

The new virtual machine setup took from 5 to 10 minutes, then the other applications started being unresponsive. After about 10 minutes, while Parallels kept beach-balling, other applications’ menus refused to open, then the OmniGraffle inspector palettes opened with blank panels, the dock was frozen and other otherwise “solid” UI elements stopped responding. Hmm, funny. When the mouse pointer was frozen too, I hard-rebooted the machine.

When restarted, the MacBook threw a kernel panic. I tried a gain, only to get the same result. And a couple more times. I also tried to boot from the Mac OS install CD. Another kernel panic. Now that was funny.

Then I tried booting in Windows. It worked! I installed Medifour’s MacDrive software to see the Mac partition from Windows. Unfortunately, MacDrive couldn’t list the files on the Mac partition. Said something about a “corrupt catalog”. The funny thing is that its disk check tool couldn’t find any errors. Aaanyway….

I tried booting from the AppleCare CD. It’s not bootable? That’s funny.

The AppleCare booklet said something about downloading the latest version of TechTool from the AppleCare site. In order to do this, I had to get the serial number from under the battery and contact AppleCare. Now something funny happened again. The serial number sticker was missing from the battery compartment.

I now thought it would be a good idea to boot in FireWire target mode and see if I can repair the disk from my other Mac. The Tiger Disk Utility on the other Mac couldn’t find any errors on the Mac OS partition. This was totally funny.

I just rebooted and the Mac works again. How funny.

I am typing this on it, really fast, so I can get back to work and finish the load of work that piled up during the most unproductive day I had since I work here. Ok, it’s only been a week.