BubblesSOC

I started feeling under the weather this past Saturday. I was scared it was the flu because I had body aches, congestion, and a sore throat. Sunday, however, I felt a lot better. Monday was ok, but that night, it hit me again like a ton of bricks. This morning, I woke up with no voice! I’ve never lost my voice before, so it’s the weirdest thing ever. I cannot talk louder than a whisper.

The Mac is back. While in target disk mode, I burned the contents of my hard drive to CDs. Afterwards, I tried an Archive and Install. It didn’t work, so I had to erase my hard drive and start from scratch. I still don’t know what caused the malfunction. I see it happening again, though, because I’m still having some problems. I guess it may be a hardware issue after all.

Here’s a recap of the day the Mac died. This past weekend, my Powerbook G4 15″ (running Tiger) started randomly turning off for some unknown reason. When I tried to restart it, nothing happened. I reset the PMU a couple of times and it would come back on, but after a few minutes, it would turn off again. While troubleshooting, I decided to take the battery out and use only the AC adapter while I worked on a project. A few minutes later, I accidently pulled out the AC adapter, which immediately shut the computer off (I don’t know why the internal battery didn’t take over?) That’s when the serious problems began. I tried to restart, but it froze on the blue ‘Starting Mac OS X’ screen. After another reset, it tried loading, but took forever. Finally it took me to a login screen, but none of my correct login information would work. I booted using the install disk so that I could change my password, but it couldn’t find my username or information. Next, I ran the Repair Disk utility. It couldn’t repair the errors, so I was scared my hard drive had crashed. I booted in Single-User mode and ran the fsck -fy command, which successfully repaired all the errors. I tried to reboot while in Single-User mode and discovered the problem – it ‘couldn’t find root user’. I was on the phone with tech support and a product specialist for an hour. Apparently, the only way to resolve this problem is to reinstall Mac OS X, which wasn’t hard at all. Thankfully, my hard drive wasn’t damaged and I salvaged all of my files. I did learn a valuable lesson from this experience – always make backups!!