Last week my Macbook Pro crashed. It would hang on the startup screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gear for about 5-10 minutes then restart it self, and continue to loop. The culprit may have been a recent firmware update from Apple, but I have a hunch it had something to do with me messing around with the permissions on the HD.

Ever since I setup Leopard I was having problems installing software on my main admin account, mike. So I made an alternate account to install software, I figured this had something to do with permissions, so I decided to try adding a custom permission on the entire Macintosh HD to allow “mike” Read & Write permissions. It took like 20 minutes for the permissions to apply to the enclosed items, after it finished I rebooted, and was never able to recover.

Steps to Recovery
First thing I tried was the obvious, Safe Boot, which is Mac’s equivalent to Microsoft Window’s Safe Mode. To do this as soon as you power on your computer start holding the Shift key down. I had no luck with Safe boot, so I was hoping I could boot to CD still in order to run the Disk Repair utility thats built into the startup disk that came with my Macbook, or at the very least reinstall the operating system.

To boot from CD, the steps are similar to Safe Boot only as soon as you power on your computer start holding down the “C” key, once your CD is in the drive of course. This was successful, So I proceeded to load the startup disk. Without Clicking next on the Setup Wizard I chose Utilities from the Menu at the top of the screen and went into the Disk Utility. From here I was able to run a “Disk Repair” and also a “Permissions Repair” both returned no errors, so I was pretty sure the problem wasn’t fixed.

I eventually came to the conclusion I needed to reinstall OS X. Although I didn’t want to lose all my files and settings only thing I wouldn’t be able to recover was my Thunderbird e-mail and folders. As i started the setup wizard I notice the installation method chosen for me by default was called “Archive and Install” after doing some research I discovered OS X will make a directory of all your user’s files and settings from any previous installations of OS X. This is completely new to me, when reinstalling Windows everything will be erased during the re-installation, unless you chose to do a repair install, which I guess may be similar to the Archive and Install. Anyways the installation took a little over an hour, when I was finally up and running again I opened Macintosh HD to find a directory named “Previous System 1″ that contained all my users’ directories, and application folder. So I was able to drag and drop the contents of my old Libraries folder, Documents and Applications over to my freshly installed OS.

So everything is back and better then it ever was. I can now even install software on my main user account. Only problem I had was with Adobe Photoshop CS3. Apparently if you do an Archive and Install on OS X, then the system doesn’t copy the Adobe Unit Types file to the ScriptingAdditions folder, you can read more details in this Adobe Technote.

Conclusion
After this experience I will no longer procrastinate setting up Time Machine to get a backup of my system as frequently as possible. I also know that if all else fails, the Archive and Install method works great and makes it simple to recover files and settings from a previous installation of OS X.

Tags: MacBook Pro, OS X, recovery

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.