19 days of sweet uptime on the OS box, then we have to go and have a five-second power outage today. After reboot, most of my apps won’t launch. The dock icons just bounce eternally. Try to Force Quit and they won’t quit. App launching is stuck in limbo.
Reboot in single user mode and run fsck -y. One small error found, but that doesn’t fix the problem. Try to reinstall X 10.1 but it won’t let me – says it can’t find a valid OS X installation. Which is ridiculous because the OS will still boot.
Call Apple Support for the first time. Friendly and patient, but I felt like I knew more about OSX than the rep did, and I’ve only been using for a couple months. He suggested installing over again back from OSX and going through the upgrades, which is what I was hoping to avoid.
So install OS X. Install OS X.1. Then do all the online software updates to get back to X.1.1. Some of the downloadable updates are upwards of 10MBs. I’ve already done these – aren’t they cached somewhere? Why do I have to download them all again?
Problem solved, but there goes half my Saturday. As if there weren’t other things I wanted to be working on today.
Lessons:
1) HFS+ needs journaling badly.
2) Apple Support ain’t that helpful. Could have gotten better answers for free online.
3) HFS+ needs journaling badly.