Friday, December 21st, 2007
This is certainly weird. When I first got my Mac Mini, I installed Windows XP along side OSX — I figured boot-camp would be a nice accessory if I ever needed/wanted to boot into XP for anything. After the XP install, I never went back into Windows. I had no reason to do so, thus I stuck with OSX day in and day out. That is, however, until tonight.
For whatever reason, my Mac Mini was misbehaving tonight. It was very laggy (and it’s never laggy), and applications just didn’t seem to want to work. I tried closing all of my applications (in hopes of running disk utility, and the like), but nothing seemed to work which would help my situation. So, I turned to turning off my Mac Mini completely by holding the power button down for several seconds.
I proceed to let it restart. Nothing happens — just the typical OSX gray screen. After several minutes, a screen pops-up telling me to restart. Ok, what? Fine. I restart it, again — same thing. I decided to hop on my finance’s laptop to do some troubleshooting. I go through the various steps mentioned throughout many support areas, but nothing seemed to work. Nothing improved my situation. I tried going through diagnostic mode, as well, but the system kept hanging. This was obviously a clear sign that my issue is somewhat hardware-related.
My next instinct was to try and repair OSX, one way or another, even if it meant a fresh install. So, I proceed through the install motions to the point where it asks me to select a disk. The problem? The install kept waiting and waiting on “processing disk information.” This was a huge red flag. After a solid ten minutes of “processing,” it finally allows me to select a target disk. I proceed to click the OSX partition. Then it hits me — let me run disk utility through the OSX install disc.
It turns out that there is something wrong with the OSX partition and according to disk utility, it’s unrepairable. I tried to repair it several times, but it was failure after failure. I decide to try and boot into the XP partition, and what do you know — the partition works. I thought maybe if I restart through XP then my problems would be fixed.
But upon restarting into OSX, I realized my problem wasn’t going away. So, I quickly booted back into XP, and here I am.
Not much is on the OSX partition. I keep my music on several external hard-drives, so that’s all safe. Sure, I’ll be losing many applications, some key documents, and my bookmarks, but they’re all replaceable.
My question, however, is if it’s even possible for just a partition to go bad on a hard-drive, while the other partitions work fine. Any ideas?
Regardless, I found a relatively cheap 100gb hard-drive to replace my current Mac Mini hard-drive with. It’s a slight upgrade from the existing drive, 60gb to 100gb, 8mb cache to 16mb cache, both 7200rpm. I figured I’ll do a clean install on that new drive, and then try to work on restoring the information on my bad partition through an external drive-bay.
The next couple of days, I’ll be using XP on my Mac Mini. I never thought this day would come. But, believe it or not, fortunately, it did come. Without it, I probably would be left without a clue for a few days.
Tags: hard-drive, Mac Mini, OSX, XP
December 21st, 2007 at 2:11 am
Forced to use XP. Whadda nightmare.
These two Macs are my first, but I’m convinced that they’ll last for as long as I replace hardware. I’ve had to replace the modem on the Mini and some RAM on the powerbook so far..
I’m so used to PCs just self-destructing after two years.
December 21st, 2007 at 1:30 pm
My powerbook is a beast — I swear I’ve dropped that thing countless times, and it’s been working like a charm since day one.
This is my first glitch with the mini, but such is life with hard-drives with moving parts. I’ve been thus far very happy with it, but the last 2-3 months, I’ve been outgrowing it. I think in about a year, I’m going to pick up an iMac or even splurge on a PowerMac.