Genius Bar visit day- that's never a good thing

I guess I was missing the experience of visiting the local Genius Bar so my MacBook Pro decided to push me in that direction today.  Actually my problems began late last night as the MBP hung up and wouldn't recover.  I had to kill it via the Power button and when I tried to restart it got the familiar "3 beeps of RAM death".  I have experienced those beeps a few times in the past and just like before they meant my MBP was not going to cooperate and boot up.  After far too much time last night fussing with it I finally got the system to safe boot up and stay running long enough for me to run TechTools Deluxe which is available to AppleCare customers.

This good utility ran a whole bunch of diagnostics and determined that the 3 beeps were telling the truth, I had bad RAM.  It was by this time very late last night so I went to bed with the intention of jumping headfirst into the problem this morning.  I did just that too and it was like jumping headfirst into the shallow end and smashing my head on the bottom of the pool.

The MacBook still wouldn't boot up so I turned it over and removed both RAM cards (1 GB & 2 GB) and swapped slots.  I put it back together and hit the power button while holding my breath.  It got the gray boot screen without the 3 beeps of RAM death which was a step forward but after a while at that screen the device would just shut itself off.  Time to make an appointment with my local Genius and this afternoon off I went.

The Genius Bar experience itself is still very refreshing, good attention from the staff who actually listen to what I have to say and then act on it.  He plugged in his magic disk drive with Leopard on it and booted it up quickly, only to determine that the MBP was not able to mount the internal disk drive which was causing the boot failure.  He did some diagnostics which told him the only option was to erase the drive and reinstall Leopard to see if the drive was OK.  He did this over the next 20 minutes with me watching everything.  I wasn't concerned with his wiping the drive clean since I have been dutifully keeping the system backed up with Time Machine to my Buffalo 500 GB external firewire drive.  Silly me.

When the install finished his diagnostics showed that everything with the system was A-OK, RAM good, disk drive good, all was good.  I took the system home with the plan of restoring the Time Machine backup and getting back to work.  Silly me.  I plugged the external backup drive into the firewire port and watched the disk access light go berserk flashing.  After 5 minutes the flashing stopped, only for me to see that the drive was not mounted by Leopard.  Uh oh.  I ran Disk Utility in OS X which I was glad to see could actually see the drive was connected even though it wasn't mounted properly.  This let me run the repair option which took 10 minutes only to end in failure.  The log isn't very detailed but it tells me that the disk cannot be repaired so here I am now, no way to restore the only full backup I have and save all my data.  I will be very impacted by this failure of first the internal drive and then the external backup drive at the same time.  I'm still desperately trying to get the drive to a point where I can at least mount it in the hopes that I can keep it mounted long enough to restore my system, or at least as much of it as I can.  It doesn't look good for the home team, Casey's count is 0-2 and it doesn't look good.

Comments

[jaytv111]

This person had a similar experience: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=478594

His computer crashed and it erased an external hard drive. Seems like a problem with Leopard.

[Borgel]

Well, good luck. It's always a disappointing day when all that data which you though was safe goes poof.

If it helps, in the past I've had some luck mounting drives I though were lost in Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) and recovering data. Who knows, it might work for you.

Good luck!

[turn.self.off]

its kinda interesting how the ram and drive is all good after a format. it makes one really wonder as this seems to be a repeating pattern. and good luck onn getting that external drive going. it shows why i worry about using harddrives as backup medium unless one is at least talking some kind of mirroring on 2 or more...

[Ricky B.]

Man! You have the worst luck with OS X, I swear.

... or is this kind of thing normal?

[Ben]

"It just works"...?

[Mlalahoi]

I have to say, if any single part of this clusterf**k had been MS there would be 500 comments on here deploring the evils of all things Gates. Note the silence from the Mac world when, just as the "linux never crashes" people had to be schooled with thousands of pics of crashed systems in the wild, eventually the truth overcomes the advertising and fantacism and yes...Mac's are prone to all the same kinds of problems any other computer system is, and no, they don't "just work." they are "just cooler looking and more expensive"

[Jeff_R]

VERY sorry to hear about your troubles!

I must admit, I can't consider onsite as an option for critical backups. For example, what if there's a fire, or a serious power surge? Or, in this case, an OS level error?

I personally use Mozy; with unlimited online backup plus versioning at approx. $60 per year, it's a vital part of my work.

And as for Ricky B.'s question, is it normal? Not that I know of; however, it is nowhere near as rare as it should be. I've heard many people are having the same or similar problems, where their OSX install is wiping their data.

[Maximilian]

Hi JK,

first of all best of luck, I hope it will work out in the end. In the worst case I would try to get help from some hardcore professional data recovery people. They once saved my moms buisiness data by mounting the platters of her half 'burned' HD into another casing....

[rijc99]

Next time you come across a fan boy who spouts Apples just work... Ask them this... If Apples just work, why is there a need for the Genius Bar and why is it always packed?!?

[Ze Stuart]

JK all is not lost! The only plus point in this scenario is the journalling file system, that and it's stored on a magnetic disk.

I had a similar problem where I had to reformat a Mac HD (ended up formatting it three times), this time caused by disk errors. First I removed the HD from the Mac, put in in a Dell compute and ran a HD repair utility (quite an incredible one, especially when it only costs $60).

I then put the HD in a USB PATA device and attached it to a working Windows computer. As the HD was formatted in an unintelligible system to Windows, I had to use a utility to allow Windows to read it called MacDrive. Once that was in the drive was in My Computer, so I could run WinUnDelete and low and behold: out of the 3094 photos I wanted from the HD, all but three were recovered perfectly.

Feel free to drop me an email if you want to know any more, and good luck!

[James Urquhart]

Yikes! Sounds like a complete nightmare :(

Though it just goes to show that relying on just 1 backup is a recipe for disaster.

In any case, good luck.

[Marcin M.]

JK, please don't loose your faith in tech!! ;) What I would do is to plug the drive into a Linux portable distro like Knoppix for instance and see what the drive looks like, then try recovery software yourself or consult data recovery center, depending how valuable/recoverable from different sources data you stored there.

I agree that it seems to be rather a problem with the logical layer of the partition and the data should be intact for 99,9%.

Gee, I hope my redundant backup: portable HDD + remote rsync to server at home would help me out in this kind of situation...

Good luck and keep us posted!!

[Taxman]

James, you should still be able to access the files on your Time Machine backup without having to do an actual restore. Your data is by no means lost. I'd recommend that you get your system running stable and then copy over your critical files manually from the back up if it is a software / OS problem.

[James Kendrick]

Taxman, my problem is that OS X will not mount the drive so that I can access it. I'd have to connect it to another system to try to recover things myself but I haven't had time to look at it.

[Bill]

Just a minor inconvience, just keep in mind that the system is "cool", "hip" and is packed in very clever packaging.Just a minor inconvenience, just keep in mind that the system is "cool", "hip" and is packed in very clever packaging. The total loss of all your data and your 4th or so visit to the genius bar with the same machine is nothing compared to that HD thrashing issue you had with vista, or that sleep issue that was a huge deal breaker by any standard.
Apple stuff is fresh, cool, and even if it trashes all your data they still blow away anything out there. Too many people focus on reliability and function- this is a misconception, a PC is a fashion statement first, a useful tool second.
Keep us informed how things go, I’m sure it will be fine, and even if it does not it’s not a big deal, since it’s a Mac!

[Frustrated Consumer]

Man, the guy has a problem and the religious wars start up again. Take it somewhere else people, the guy just wants to get his system running. Sheesh...

[turn_self_off]

i think bill is being ironic or sarcastic...

[Jon M]

Kevin I had the same problem with my Dual 1.8 GHz G5, and it almost looked like a RAM problem, but it was an UPGRADE problem. After I upgraded my G5 to Leopard over 2 months it proceeded to corrupt my external hard drive. It wasn't until I kept getting the good ole gray power symbol screen in 15 different languages, that I noticed that my external hard drive would not mount. When I hooked it up to my MacBook Pro 17" it showed that it was there but the directories were damaged. NOTHING could resurrect this drive and remount it. After I realized that archive and re-install failed (took it 48 hours to give me the gray power screen in 15 lang .....)That I finally wiped it and reloaded it from scratch. The G5 has been fine ever since then, but I had to reformat my external Firewire drive. BOTH are working fine now. My theory is that the buggy upgrade of Leopard somehow ended up corrupting my drive. Add to it the "supposed" RAM problems and it makes sense that my G5 was probably corrupting it until it crashed. The strange part is that this is 1 of 5 drives on the Mac (2 internal, 3 chained to a FireWire via a hub). I just chalk it up to an Apple quirk, one of many i have dealt with, with no resolution over the 13 years I have used them.

[Jon M]

My bad, I meant James.

[Partners in Grime]

Yikes. I am going to open a .Mac account and backup important data offsite.

[Dave]

Have you considered taking your laptop and the external drive back to the Apple store and saying, "Look what your computer did."

There's a possibility that they might accept there's a problem and pay for the data recovery. In particular, I'm absolutely shocked at the numb-nuts approach of formatting and re-installing Leopard.

A dodgy boot partition can be fixed with about 3 words to the Recovery Console command prompt in Windows, I'd assume they have some sort of Mac OS equivalent?

Sounds like you had a rotten bit of bad luck.

[Koink]

James, this is exactly why everything stored on a laptop should be 3rd tier redundant data. you should have a centralized file-server which is then backed up to external HDD's. if you did, then right now you could restore the corrupted file-server with the external HDD's.

i'm surprised you actually backup the system image (with embedded data!) to en external HDD, thats quite amateur-ish. data should always be double backedup OUTSIDE of a system image (if data is embedded inside the system image then it should be 3rd tier).

[Nate]

This kind of garbage is exactly why I don't have a Macbook anymore. Mine was going in for service every, nearly, two months. I kept telling myself that it could happen with any manufacturer, but the fact is, it's only ever happened with my Macs.

OSX is great. Mac hardware is anything but.