"I think the Mac gods are mad at you. Did you make fun of Steve Jobs' Lear Jet again?" said Cody at the Mac store, where I spilled my tale of woe and forked over my credit card for a copy of Leopard.
That is the level to which my technical assistance devolved over the course of another frustrating day. I have twice before now started this blog entry on a far more hopeful note, praising the simplicity of the Burly box from MacGurus that was just delivered, and celebrating the spill of data from my sagging, overcrowded drives into this roomy, 4tb JBOD box. But any time I tried to get my hopes up and pretend everything was running smoothly, the data flow would cease, and the computer would freeze up and crash.
Brian at MacGurus has been fabulous. "I'm here for you all day," was his message. "Most everyone plugs these units in and we never hear from them again, until they get another one. We'll get you through this."
I shipped off system logs and system profiles. I ran memory tests. I unplugged and pulled out innards of the computer. He also called in the technician at CalDigit, the maker of the eSata card that connected to the box, and we were on the phone for hours. They were not happy hours, nice as he was. "Let's do a P-RAM boot," he said. This, effectively, clears the computer's throat, getting all that data phlegm out of the boot cycle. But it wouldn't work. "Are you holding down the P and the R and the Command and the Control key, all at once? Here, go to this website at Apple. Are those the keys you're holding down?" They were. It wasn't working. Nor was another maneuver to open up the computer to a command line. The only thing that was happening was that, about every other time, one of my monitors wouldn't fire up. It was only making my graphics card hiccup.
The Mac gods were laughing at us.
Finally, I tried switching the keyboard to another USB port. Worked like a charm. "What is going on with your computer? I've never heard of that!" said poor Leslie at CalDigit.
I tried another data download. 10 gigabytes transferred over without a hiccup, the most yet. I hooked up my single drive CoolDrive box that I use for back-up. 20gb without a hitch. I said goodbye at 35gb. "It's working now. This is great. I'll write up how wonderful you were."
Within a minute of hanging up the phone, the computer crashed. I think I heard giggling from the heavens above.
Next move--change operating systems. I'm installing Leopard on another drive.
at some point you have to start thinking it's the mother board.
Posted by: Chuq Von Rospach | December 11, 2007 at 06:56 PM
Doug,
Don't rely on Time Machine in Leopard for backing up your data, because it has some serious limitations detailed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(Apple_software)
Posted by: Chris Junker | December 12, 2007 at 12:55 PM