Sometimes things just go awry....

So I am sitting at my desk at home yesterday, ripping some DVDs with Handbrake, when my Quad suddenly KPs and gives me the GSOD. Not a good thing. I restart and everything seems ok, but as I usually do after and “unplanned” restart, I open Disc Utility and repair permissions and check the disc. Repair permissions went fine, but fixing the disc was another story. Disc Utility gave me a “File B-Tree mismatch” error and when it tried to fix it it would fail saying “Disc repair failure: The underlying task failed upon exit”. Not a good sign.

I grabbed my Quad OSX disc, popped it and booted from it. Ran Disc utility, same deal, same error. So I start thinking that maybe I have a real problem with the disc and need to reformat it. I boot back to the HDD and open Carbon Copy Cloner and set up to clone my boot drive to one of my other drives. Half way through, I get a GSOD and a KP. Really not good! I reboot, run it again, same thing. Hmmm.

I rebooted from the OSX install disc and decided to do a basic install on another disc and try using CCC again to clone my main drive. Install OSX, boot from the other drive, run CCC and again, KP and GSOD. ***!

Ah, wait, I have Tech Tool Deluxe! Let’s let techtool look at the main disc and see what IT finds. I open tech tool, update it from the Micromat site, and run it just on the main drives volume structure. TT tells me there are MAJOR disc errors, but that it can fix them, YAY! I let TT do it’s thing and it finds 2 million (yes, 2 MILLION!) errors on the drive. Ok, I click Repair and away it goes. Then it tells me it’s done, I check it again, same thing, 2 Million errors. Let TT repair and get the same thing. Ok, this is odd.

Lets let Disc utility look at it again! Disc utility says it can not unmount the volume! Huh? Maybe it’s because TT was messing with it. Reboot from the OSX install disc, run Disc utility, same thing, can not unmount disc. Reboot to the alternate boot drive, try to run CCC, same thing, KP and GSOD!

Ok, so I can’t clone my drive, I can’t fix my drive, all I can do is copy my stuff off and reformat. Open Cocktail, turn on invisible items, and copy my whole main boot drive to another external. The boot drive was partitioned into 2 equal sized partitions, so I copy the contents of the other drive over to a 4th drive (I have LOTS of drive space) and leave it all to copy overnight. Get up in the morning, all copying complete. Open disc utility and select the main drive and select Format. I get an error that the drive will not unmount again. Ok, boot from the OSX DVD, open disc utility and select format. FINALLY the drive formats and disc utilities check runs fine, finds no errors.

I spend the remainder of the morning, before work, doing a fresh install of OSX and running all of the updates. Now all I have to do when I get home tonight is copy all of my stuff, Profile, Library, Apps etc, over to the new System and get it all to work together again. I’ve done it before, but it’s going to be time consuming I know.

I guess sometimes weird stuff just happens…..

Man, that sucks, and is quite strange...

Hopefully that doesn't happen again.

Been there, done that, it sucks! Hopefully all is well now...

It is interesting that you are having problems, last night. I am having a problem with a few of my applications (terminating). I just rebooted, hopefully all is well.

Well, it’s all fixed. I simply booted to the temporary drive, and dragged my Users Folder, Systems Library folder and Applications folder from my old (copied) profile back to the newly installed system on the boot drive and then ran repair permission. After 5 min of Disc Utility fixing all the permissions, I was able to boot back to my main drive and pretty much everything was the same as before. Disc Utility and Tech Tool find no disc errors, so all seems well.

Thats good, I have no clue what GSOD is though, In know KP is Kernel Panic.

GSOD=Gray Screen of Death. When you get a KP, the system screen grays out and tells you, in several languages, that you need to restart your computer.

baggss said:

GSOD=Gray Screen of Death. When you get a KP, the system screen grays out and tells you, in several languages, that you need to restart your computer.

Click to expand...

Oh, I remember using an old, old Mac and a little bomb popped up.

The bomb was the classic Mac version. In OSX, the screen actually turns grey...