Hindsight is 20/20

I’d have to agree with that. Yesterday I came home from work went up stairs to plug in my iPod into the iMac. Usually when I do this the iMac will wake up and run iTunes to keep the iPod up to date. This time nothing happened, the monitor was off and the only thing showing any signs of life was the “sleep” light on the bottom right of the display. Usually it throbs like a heart beat when its sleeping but this time it was lit up solid.

My plan was to install SuperDuper! tonight when I got home so I could have my first backup. I thought I finally installed all the apps I needed and everything was working quite well. I guess this wasnt the case. I reached behind and turned the poor thing off and back on again, OS X loaded except the desktop kept flashing the windows and icons over and over again. The menu bar wouldn’t load all of its icons (I have MenuMeters installed). I used my OS X disk and had it check the permissions and verify the disk, both came out clean. I rebooted and tested the system using the AppleCare disk to make sure the components were running well. That passed too! I even flashed the PRAM during bootup and thats when things went nutso. The screen came up black (like a console) and it started saying Kernel Panic and talked about how launchd wasnt loading and would keep trying a few more times. It finally gave up and locked up. I rebooted and went into safemode. Safemode said in the black console that Parallels was loading and then it would lock up right after that. I tried to call AppleCare and it was past 6pm so they were closed.

I tried reinstalling the OS, I’ve done this countless times at work on our macs and never once lost anyones home directory or user files. It asked me if I wanted to save my home directory and archive it, then install the OS. I agreed and it began to do so. I had it check the media since I’ve never used it before and it passed that test. It began installing and I went downstairs for a bit. 20 mins later I went back up and it said the install failed and to try again. I rebooted and tried again, I skipped the media check this time and went through the steps, I got to the point where the install asks if I wanted to backup my user files and it was grayed out. Wonderful… I just turned off the machine and called it a night.

This morning I went on the Brea Apple Store Concierge site and made an appointment for a Apple Genius to look at the machine for me. Apple’s support website states that kernel panics could happen for a number of reasons but usually its due to the logic board or memory going bad. Hell if I know, I’m a PC Guy trying to become a Mac Guy.

I cant wait for Time Machine…