My Trip to the Genius Bar, Part 1

I really needed MobileMe yesterday. Had my data been synched everywhere, as Apple promises, I could have more quickly recovered from unexpected disaster. A recent Time Machine backup could have saved my butt, too. But I had been living too much in the present, when a little effort could have preserved the past. The story I tell is confessional, for there is little excuse for having no backup when Apple provides the necessary tools. Please learn from my folly.

I had wondered about the MacBook Air hard drive during its first week's use. The drive would ever so occasionally "click, click, click." In my past PC experience, clicking usually meant some trouble with the hard drive. Two months ago, I searched Apple Support forums and found the noise to be a common concern among Air owners. An Apple Support document indicated that the sounds were normal.

I can't say that the occasional clicking noises indicated trouble; they may be normal. But I can say this: The clicking sounds almost completely stopped over the last week of the MacBook Air's use. Maybe the absence of clicking noises indicated something abnormal.

For more than a month, I kept thinking about backing up, every time I heard that "click, click, click." Around the time I got the Air, I bought an Apple Time Capsule. First-time setup is a hassle, though, really requiring an Ethernet connection for fastest backup. I'm constantly writing, and so I kept putting off the Time Capsule setup. Funny aside: I IMed another journalist last night about my troubles. He had just backed up with Time Capsule the night before, after putting it off for four months. He also complained of the initial setup as his reason for stalling. Remember: We both bought these devices for backup.

Starting a Productive Day
Yesterday, I spent the early morning (Pacific Time) working on an analysis of iPhone 3G talk time, which was posted around 2 p.m. EDT—that's 11 here. Most of my colleagues were in New York for a meeting, and my wife and daughter were out for most of the day. That meant fewer interruptions and more productivity. I planned on writing at least four posts.

As I worked, there was little indication that the hard drive would fail. Over several days, the clicking had almost completely stopped, which was a relief. The little rainbow ball—Apple's iconic symbol for busy application or process—appeared more often than usual, when saving blog posts. Almost all my writing is done in a Web browser. I assumed the rainbow balls and the longer-than-usual pauses related to Safari 3.1. I had lots of tabs open and hadn't closed and relaunched the browser for days.

Around 2:30 p.m. EDT, after finishing proofreading and editing the live iPhone 3G post, I turned to writing about Firefox 3, which was big news of the day. The Twittersphere had exploded with complaints about the software being unavailable. Eric Shepherd, Mozilla's developer documentation lead, tweeted about 1 p.m. EDT (release time): "Servers died almost immediately after launch ... the IT robots are working on it."

So I started writing about Mozilla's problems over at Microsoft Watch, while trying to download Firefox 3. Around 3 p.m., the download finally started, after two dozen attempts, at sluggish 11k/sec.

Now, I shouldn't blame Firefox 3, but it was during the download that the hard drive failed. While I was writing, that little rainbow ball appeared unexpectedly and didn't go away. I figured the download had been too much for Safari. Since I hadn't saved the blog post to the server for a few minutes, I wanted to preserve the last couple of paragraphs. So I clicked on the Spotlight search icon and typed "Grab," to do a screen capture. Mac OS X froze. Completely. The mouse worked and nothing else.

But Coldplay continued to play, from an external hard drive, so I assumed the computer would eventually unlock. That morning, I had bought the album "Viva la Vida" from the iTunes store. The album is technically precise, beautifully recorded and boring. Poetically, perhaps, "Death and All His Friends" played; I didn't realize that it would be the MacBook Air's swan song. I listened and waited, staring at the still life my Mac OS X desktop had become. The song ended, perhaps being buffered in memory, and I stared in silence.

Blinking Folder of Doom
What happened next is the reason for this post. I powered off and on the Air, which came up to a flashing folder and question mark. Anyone intimately familiar with Macs knows that's a really bad symbol. I rebooted. Over and over again, always coming back to that blinking folder of doom. I used my wife's computer to check Apple Support before doing the troubleshooting I planned: booting from the Leopard installation DVD to fix the hard drive. Maybe there was a bad sector or the startup disk needed to be reset. The Support docs suggested exactly what I planned.

But something terrible happened next. Disk Utility saw no hard drive. I next flushed the PRAM, which could have fixed an intermittent glitch. I repeated the flush again and again. There was no hard drive visible to disk utility. Then, purely in desperation, I did the unthinkable: I smacked the computer's bottom with the palm of my hand. Maybe a drive head had gotten stock, I speculated.

The spanking worked! The Air started to boot up, but never got past the Apple logo. So, I again flushed the PRAM and used Disk Utility, which now detected the hard drive, to repair the disk. The utility found the operating system intact, but the repair failed, apparently because of physical problems with the drive. I would later discover that the hard drive simply disappeared from detection during the repair disk process. I repeated the PRAM flushing with, afterwards, the hard drive sometimes appearing and sometimes not. Repair disk failed every time.

I've had few really low moments using computers. My last catastrophic hard drive failure occurred about a decade ago, which partly explains my backup procrastination. Yesterday's crash was the lowest moment. Music I keep on an external hard drive, and there is a backup on my wife's laptop. Photos I want are posted online. Most of my writing is done online in blogs. But I use and store e-mail locally.

There was no escaping the fact that I would conceivably lose more than two months of e-mail, practically a half year. My last saved Apple Mail folder was from December, when I moved back to Windows Vista for four months (I regularly switch between Apple and Microsoft operating systems for writing the two eWEEK "Watch" blogs). I had four months (December to March) of e-mail still tucked away in Outlook, if I wanted to go through the process of getting it on the Mac. I don't.

But I still had some hope of recovering my data, and maybe an Apple Genius could do it.

[Editor's Note: Part Two of this saga explains the surprising events at the Apple Genius Bar and the impact they will have on my future Mac computing.]

Posted by Joe Wilcox on June 18, 2008 1:30 PM