Genius? Maybe..

My trip to the White Mecca went pretty well, I got there 15 minutes early (20 actually) and sat down for my name to be displayed on the big plasma displays above the Genuis Bar. I talked to the “Genius” about my problem, slowly telling him each part of it. He unpacked the machine and plugged in his FireWire drive and got to work looking at the system. “Do you have Disk Warrior?” he asked “No, not yet..”. “Ah, ok… we’ll try it this way then… oh I see, looks like your home directory is gone.” he exclaimed. I replied “Yeah, I tried an archival install hoping it would save my shit, I guess it did until the install died midway, when I kicked off the installer again it didnt give me the option to save my files”. He worked on it some more and told me that the install can bork out from time to time and that its a good idea to have a backup (uh, no shit). He said I should get a .mac account for the time being, they give them away for 60 days. By then I’ll have a better solution setup. He reinstalled via Firewire and said I should also get an external backup and partion it a few times for various tasks. Backup, restore, and essential software. He showed me how his was setup and then said to come back in about 10 mins and it would be done. I gave Jen a call and gave her the lowdown. He finished the install, rebooted a few times to make sure it worked ok and then burned a cd to make sure the optical drive was working. I walked out of there not paying a dime (I really wanted to just start blowing money left and right… damn apple… damn pretty computers and flashy flashy lights… damn awesome software wall.)

My Mac is back up and running. I did an initial backup using SuperDuper! and once I find a decently priced firewire drive I’ll be doing some backups onto that.

When Mac’s die they die hard, the trick is to not store all of your essential documents on your bootdrive or at least have a decent backup plan.

Raise your hand if you own a mac.