Well the past few days have been rough since my trusty Mac decided to take a dive on me. It all started the other night when I was doing normal task such as downloading files, listening to music, surfing the web, and editing graphics. Everything was going smoothly like it normally does on my MacBook Pro until I opened some program that I can't recall. Everything started running extremely slow and I got pissed off, so naturally I just restarted my computer.
Normally that is the end of my problems, this time it was the beginning. The apple logo came on with the progress wheel after the startup sound and I thought everything was fine. I came back about five minutes later and noticed that it was still stuck on this screen. I got a little nervous but didn't think much of it so I just held down the power switch until it turned off and then I waited a couple of minutes before I restarted. This time I was curious as to what was going to happen so I watched for about ten minutes while the progress wheel spun around and around. Once again nothing happened. I tried waiting a while and trying again and again but the damn thing wouldn't boot up!
This is when I hopped online with my other computer that wasn't quite working (don't even get me started on this one!) and started to research what the hell could be wrong with my computer. I ran across a few articles that I thought would be helpful and started to try some things. I booted into safe mode, all that did was show me some error and told me to restart my laptop. I then tried resetting the ram. Nothing. Would resetting the graphics ram work? No. I tried a whole host of key combos at startup to see if they could fix my problem. Nothing was working, so I booted into verbose or single user mode to look at the log of what was going on during the startup. I started it up and left it alone for a while guessing that it would stop when the error occurred. I came back and saw a bunch of weird technical stuff on the screen and I had no idea what it meant. So I restarted it and did the same thing again only this time I watched as it happened to see if there were simpler errors that happened before that I could hopefully understand. There were. I got an error that said something along the lines of disk0s2 I/O error. I recognized this error from when I was installing Mac OSX on my pc, I got extremely nervous. On my pc I had to buy a new hard drive because that same error came up. Luckily for my pc I had everything backed up, for my Mac however, this was not the case. I looked around some more and tried to fix the error with /sbin/fsck -fy or something in verbose mode. After that ran I tried to boot and nothing happened again. I then popped in the recovery disk and went to the disk utility. I tried fixing the errors and permissions hoping that this would take care of my problem. It apparently fixed a lot of errors so I got excited and went to reboot again. Nothing changed.
Finally, I lost all hope for my data and decided I would at least try to see if I could reinstall the OS on the hard drive and not have to replace the drive entirely. I put the disk back in and started the process to reinstall the OS. I was thinking and I know on windows when this sort of thing happens it can make a folder with all of your previous files in it. I thought to myself, "Maybe there is something similar for my Mac?" So I noticed there was an option menu and I clicked on it to see what I could do. I saw "Archive and Install" as an option and it sounded like what I was looking for so I selected it and let the Mac do its thing.
It took about an hour and a half or two hours for it to complete the reinstall which was a little quicker than I expected since I have a mostly loaded 500GB hard drive. I went to boot up for the first time and I got super excited when I saw the login screen, but more importantly that it asked me to sign in to my old user account! I typed my password in and logged in. When I saw my desktop start to come on (it did take a while longer than it normally did) I noticed one by one that all of the items that I had there before where still there! My dock, my menu bar, my desktop items, everything was exactly the way I had it before. All of my media files and everything else were in exactly the same spots that I had them in before. This completely different from the way that windows does it. Microsoft really needs to take a lesson from Apple here on this one, I couldn't have asked for a simpler recovery option!
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