It all started off in a very harmless way. My PowerBook told me that it was running out of Battery power and that it would go to sleep soon. I closed the lid, I put it away. I was happy that it lasted for around 9 hours (not continous). I did not think too much about it. Then later, much later, at home, the PowerBook did not want to up anymore. It was plugged in at that point and I was just wondering about this barely visible text box that appeared in the center of the otherwise dark screen. Was it some important information burned in? Was the screen not off after all? I held the power button for several seconds and the mac shut down.
I restarted, and all I saw for the next 4 minutes or so, was a gray screen with a spinning clock thingy. Then the computer restarted again. Again gray Apple, the Aqua interface came to life, the entire familiar startup process went through, the desktop was ready to launch.
All that came up was a black screen with a brief greeting. Darwin.
>login:
I entered what I thought was my username, my password, but Darwin would not let me in. (I realized this morning that i was using the wrong username, so it is actually possible to log in at that point...)
What was there to do?
I restarted. This time the entire system came on. Everything seemed to be fine, I could log onto my home server, I took a file from the server and opened it with Photoshop and ... The screen dimmed. In the center of my Digital lifestyle was a box in 4.5 Languages.
Something like: “You have to turn off your computer now, please hold down the power key for several seconds.”, and then again in French, in German, in Japanese, and FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:
I was basically FF:d
I got to see the screen several times last night. It would just pop up randomly, while I was doing something or about to do something.
I tried the Disk Tools that came with Jaguar and they were very happy to point out that:
Verifying disk "xbox".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 431788)
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195555 instead of 195556)
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195556 instead of 195555)
The volume xbox needs to be repaired.
Verify completed.
I could not repair the disk from this point of view, because it was my startup disk, so, what shall a Mac User do? Startup in OS9.2.2. You wish.
The screen just went gray and remained so, until I restarted.
So I used the Jaguar CD to run Disk tools. And Disktools was able to repair the disk. Or so it seemed. A verification of the repair gave me the following report:
Verifying disk "xbox".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 431788)
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195555 instead of 195556)
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195556 instead of 195555)
The volume xbox needs to be repaired.
Verify completed.
Yes, same as above.... Take a look at the number of files. The number of files is off by one. One file too little, one file too much. An endless circle.
So, what was left to do but to back up all of my crucial data to my recently created home server. (Remember, I created a backup system, when my PowerBook died a few weeks ago.)
I filled the drives on my G3Tower with all the information that fit on them, moved Gigabytes of Pictures from my PowerBook to the Basestation, via firewire, until even this process crashed, bringing down my G3 Tower. Now the tower would just come up with a white screen with a non blinking cursor.
(I was getting used to the Error Can’t open message of the SCSI card.)
I reinstalled the OS. (It took several attempts again, because the OS would not install on the machine, unless I removed the SCSI card. Once up and running, the card is recognized and works perfectly fine.
Plan for tonight:
1. Finish and confirm all backup of data.
2. Format and Install a fresh version of Jaguar on the PowerBook.
3. Bring back all the data. (Except maybe for the photographs, which might be happier on a server.)
4. Order a large backup drive. (I currently have to spread the data onto 5 drives and partitions.)
5. NEVER let the PowerBook run out of battery power while in osX.
6. Reply to all the emails I was not able to reply to in the last few days.