Umm, help? Jaguar problem.

[mattblakk]

Something very weird happened to my ibook today.

I turned it on once and got the black screen of death telling me I needed to power off and restart. Did that and everthing seemed fine. Started it up a couple more times and shut down normally. Then I tried to start it again and all of my files are gone. All of the stuff from my profile has just disappeared.

I turned off file vault thinking it was the culprit.

Tried to open the mattrice.sparseimage - that looks like it has the right size to be all of my data, but it is asking me for the "login" keychain password, and I type in the only password I have on this machine and it doesn't work.

Anyone know anything about this stuff? I sure as hell don't.

Comments

[swimunderground.livejournal.com]

eee! That sounds pretty idiosyncratic ... to *me* anyway. Hard to search on too, at Apple Support.

When you say the keychain password doesn't work, you mean it's telling you that it's an incorrect password?

And that sparseimage file? That must be specific to filevault I guess? I have no such thing on my powerbook, and the only difference I can imagine is that I'm not using the filevault. ...I hate to ask, but are you under AppleCare now/anymore? ooooh Matt

Re:

[mattblakk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, still under apple care, I've had the machine less than a month.

Still, I'd rather have my friends sort it out than send it away if I can.

[swimunderground.livejournal.com]

Oh, I meant just phoning them for starters. If it's about filevault... what struck me about filevault was how much the manual and even the one-sheet infocard stated that if you lost your password for it, your data was lost forever. If this were somehow remotely possibly true, it would be something to hide, not something to trumpet... so maybe you've snafu'd (or the ibook has) yourself into some scenario where The Filevault Password Has Been Lost. And maybe Apple folks can tell you how to undo it. (except they're closed now, the buggers)

Re:

[mattblakk.livejournal.com]

I have somehow managed to mount the filevault thingy as a virtual disk and I'm copying all the files onto a data DVD.

But I think in the end I will end up doing a clean install and not using the filevault thing until it gets another update or something.

At least my data has miraculously reappeared.

Thanks for your words of moral support. Dunno what I did, but I'm going to just wait until it's all archived off on the DVD before I touch anything else.

[swimunderground.livejournal.com]

Yay! Glad to hear that data has reappeared in some fashion. I haven't gone near filevault yet, partially because of the Stern Warning.

hugs to you, friend.

[jawnbc]

Well in OS X land, I find booting from the OS install disk, running disk utility and repairing the Permissions and the disk fixes all sorts of things. If that helps, but the problem recurs, get on the horn with them and get 'em to give you a new one.

Re:

[mattblakk.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll try that.

Re:

[kugelblitz.livejournal.com]

Norton System works is an important adjunct to owning a computer.

[swimunderground.livejournal.com]

How did this turn out, Matt?

Re:

[mattblakk.livejournal.com]

I was somehow able to mount it as a disk. i then burned all the data onto a DVD and created a new user profile and migrated the stuff to it.

I'm still having the occasional black screen on death at start up, so as soon as I get my OSX disks back from my physio instructor, I'll do a clean install.


:::smootch:::

[ftmpass.livejournal.com]

I don't recommend Norton products for Macs - they're pretty notorious in Mac Usenet cirlces. Here's what I recommend for OS X maintenance/troubleshooting:

1) Macaroni, a shareware program that will make sure background UNIX maintenance tasks get run regularly even if you don't leave your computer on 24 hours a day -
http://www.atomicbird.com/

2) Alsoft's disk repair utility DiskWarrior - it's saved my butt when Disk Utility and "fsck -y" have failed: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

3) Run Repair Permissions after any software update from Apple or after any other
software updates or installs. To use:
Open Disk Utility in your Applications/Utility folder.
Click on the First Aid tab and select Repair Permissions
Click on the icon for your boot volume.
Click the repair permissions button - the repairs will run in the background.

4) Disk Repair:
A) As the computer restarts, press command-s to boot in single user mode.
B) From the command line in single user mode, type "fcsk -y" and hit "return." This checks the boot volume's file system, and repairs it if necessary. Note that this may not be able to fix all problems in a single pass, so if it finds and fixes anything (it'll print "***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****"), run it repeatedly, until it doesn't find any more errors.
C) Once you've run "fsck -y" enough times to get a "The volume ______ appears to be OK" message, type "reboot" and hit "return" to get back into normal Mac mode.