Andrey Posted April 9, 2006 Share Posted April 9, 2006 I don't see a whole lot of humorous system recovery posts on this forum [after all, when IS it humorous?!] but I figured I'd share the experience I just went through: So there I am -- just got 10.4.5 installed native, new 500W PSU faithfully distributing electrons, USB audio chirping away, and all apps and their settings in place. I optimize, restart, and optimize further. My ego inflates with each dropping boot time. I'd been so long without a problem I'd forgotten OSx86 can be a cruel mistress if you mistreat her. Since all my apps were playing so nicely I decided to let Onyx 1.6.9 run free with it's maintenance scripting duties, flushing caches and histories galore. It finished, told me to reboot and *POOF* I'm staring at Apple's version of the middle finger [read: circle w/ slash at boot-up] and the hard drive hasn't even thought about spinning up. I figure the damage can be easily contained with Disk Utility. Sadly this was untrue. Whatever in the world file allocation units are, Disk Utility swears up and down there aren't enough of them. It's even so kind as to tell me indeed *how* serious this deficit is followed by its distinct inability to fix it. [Ex Microsoft users are far too familiar with this lot.] And as a bonus, my 200GB Seagate boot drive is now being detected as a 128GB. As you can imagine, this is wonderful news for someone who hasn't gotten around to imaging their working install yet. Google's depressing outlook of the possible fixes further stressed me. DiskWarrior was out of the question, as was formatting. [Where am I going to find 7 straight seasons of Top Gear again??] Finally out of frustration I crammed the drive into my USB enclosure, and sonofa..... it booted! A bit of snooping around revealed that my precious ATI/IXP ATA driver had been, shall we say, shown the door during Onyx's mini Extensions regime change. A quick check of those seemingly precious file allocation units revealed no problems, and a reinstall of the ATA driver restored native boot functionality. Considering the bleak outlook of the allocation error as per the web, I'm glad I was able to avoid a reinstall. So there you have it, some late night install-idiocy. -Andrey PS: If you don't have a USB enclosure, uh, GET ONE Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
dripple Posted April 9, 2006 Share Posted April 9, 2006 *smile* Nice story. Had the same problem with my 300GB Maxtor. Seems to run fine, but suddently it wasn't recognized properly and shows read and write errors. I put it in my external USB enclosure and it works. But I wasn't able to put it back in the PC... still shows the wrong size (e.g. the "used" and "free" values are shown correct) dripple Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/#findComment-92364 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sabr Posted April 9, 2006 Share Posted April 9, 2006 How do you "optimize" the disk, as you were saying?? :pirate2: Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/#findComment-92714 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrey Posted April 9, 2006 Author Share Posted April 9, 2006 Manually parsing logs to find extensions without dependencies and removing them, making sure the system wasn't accumulating lots of unused files, that sort of thing. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/#findComment-92860 Share on other sites More sharing options...
alka1ine Posted April 10, 2006 Share Posted April 10, 2006 Go ahead and format it next time, pay me for 60gb of dvdrs and I'll burn you all the top gear seasons. I haven't even gotten around to watching more than 2 episodes.... Oh and if anyone gets a usb enclosure, avoid the Prolific 3507 chipsets or you'll be throwing out harddrives left and right. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/#findComment-92986 Share on other sites More sharing options...
caladan1810 Posted April 10, 2006 Share Posted April 10, 2006 hi alka1ine, thanks for the tip on the 'Prolific 3507 chipsets' greatly appreciated. Cal. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/14455-a-bit-of-install-humor-and-hysterics/#findComment-92999 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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