Thursday, July 5, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. I brought extra cupcakes to the office. Listserv maintenance. Redirected a request for help from a resident. Hiring followup. Followup with ordering Ghost. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: You will enjoy a trip to Asia. Student PT was supposed to meet me but didn't show. Patrick picked me up in the car. We met Chris and Nate at Peet's. I keep forgetting that MSO stands for management services officer. Dinner at Thai Chef (415-551-2433, 4133-18th Street) with psychobauble/Chris and Patrick. Aaron's laptop encountered a blue screen of death—STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME BSOD—so today I began investigating it. Spent the evening trying to migrate files off of Aaron's BSODed laptop, a Dell Inspiron 700m just like Patrick's. The Mac Mini at home crashed unrecoverably while copying files from Aaron's computer to the Mac Mini. You could say the Inspiron 700m put the Mac Mini in a coma. I don't know what caused it—OS X is not supposed to crash. The 700m was started up in Bart PE since I was troubleshooting a BSOD. I connected successfully to the 700m from the Mac Mini over Samba. I had to reset some permissions on the 700m in order for the Mac Mini to see the files, but I was successful at that. I began copying files and part way through the screen went completely black and neither keyboard nor mouse made it respond even after several minutes. Upon restart, I got a blank gray screen with the spinning indicator. This went on spinning for a long time and eventually I got a gray screen with a tiny blue folder OS X faces logo icon. I got photos of this and will upload them to Flickr. The Mac would simply not start up. I was not given a TechTools cdrom with this Mac—I guess my Mac is too old—but I know I have an extra one at work I could bring home to use. I had my original cds and started off that, but whenever I tried to access anything from the menus (like disk tools from the Utilities menu) I'd get the spinning beach ball and it would spin for several minutes with no response. I shut the thing off—it's no good now without some kind of startup cd I can start up into and run disk tools. My web server and bookmarks page will be down for at least through the weekend since I leave for camping and whitewater rafting with Travis tomorrow. So the bad news is that the Mac Mini is comatose for now, but the good news is that Aaron's data appears to be safe. And in the process I learned how to install network drivers with Bart PE—I had never done that before and it is simple as Bart claims once you know how. Began packing.