One Reason I Hate My Mac
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
A little over six months or so I converted to a Macbook Pro as my primary computer. Although easy to learn and use, OSX does a really bad job when unexpected things happen, such as disk issues.
I tried running the disk utility from the CD but was first told that the disk needed repair, but then I was told that it couldn't be repaired because it had an error.
Apple is very big on promoting their 'iLife' - the idea that everything you might need is already loaded on your computer. Not true. I was quickly informed that there is nothing on my Mac that can help me at this point, but a friend pointed me over to the Apple store and told me I needed DiskWarrior. For the low low price of $99 plus tax I learned that I could hopefully correct this not-so-uncommon issue that the operating system creates from time to time.
Okay, so I plunked down my money (virtually speaking of course) and found out that I'd have to wait for it to be shipped. Why? Should I not be able to download it? Then I took a little trip over to the manufacturers site where I learned that for the same price I could both download the cure and receive a CD in the mail... so I bought it... again...All's good, right? Wrong. Its a disk problem and I've just downloaded the cure to my disk. You guessed it: the cure cannot run from the broken disk. Okay, no problem. I'll just put it on a bootable CD and try running it that way.
No where in the instructions for this application do they tell you how to do this though. And OSX certainly doesn't make it obvious. The docs explain how to install onto my hard drive, but I already know how to do that and I already know (what they don't tell you) is that it won't do any good living there.
So now I am stuck... waiting for someone to deliver a CD containing what may or may not fix this issue which I'm told is fairly common in OSX but which is not addressed by Apple.
So now I'm working on my 4-year-old Acer tablet - the one that has never had an issue - that runs that Microsoft software that everyone loves to bash...
Labels: apple, ilife, osx, problem
posted by Russell @ 4:21 PM,
5 Comments:
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At 5:21 PM,
groovehouse said...
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Wow... 'hate' and 'mac' in the same sentance, this is virtually unheard of, someone call the media, this is news!! :P
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At 12:59 PM,
said...
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I will be interested to know how you get on with this my mac just gave me the same disc issue message yesterday when I ran disc utility.
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At 1:02 PM,
Russell said...
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derrick: i'll keep you posted. so far i've tried everything i could find to use the diskwarrior software that i downloaded with no success. hopefully the cd's they ship will do the trick.
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At 10:37 AM,
Derrick said...
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Ok Russell thanks for that.
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At 12:23 PM,
saucey said...
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You should know that there is a free utility called Applejack that can be installed on your hard drive.
You install it, and boot to single user mode by holding down CMD-S at startup.
Once you get a prompt, type "applejack", and it gives you a short list of options to repair the disk, fix permissions etc...
Repair your disk and you're all set =) For free.
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