I had been going really well for a long time. I have had no computer problems for months now. Then, in the span of 24 hours, I managed to kill two computers by not doing anything out of the ordinary. What’s amazing is that the two computers in question were both Macs.<\/p>\n
I first hosed the karaoke machine (the “computer” which is just an external bootable hard drive, currently living on my G4 cube) by trying to use the command-line software upgrade, but then not finishing the process. At least I think<\/i> that’s what caused it. The problem was that the Finder would keep starting up, then crashing, then starting up, then crashing. I had to reinstall the OS (in the wee hours of the morning, of course), but it seems to be working now.<\/p>\n
Then the very next day, I was playing with my Powerbook, and I tried booting into OS 9. I got a flashing question mark disk icon, so I tried switching back, but it wouldn’t let me. I tried booting to my hardware test disk, but it couldn’t mount the drive. The next morning, I called Apple tech support, and in the process ended up using the Disk Utilities that come on the 10.3 install disk, which did<\/i> find the disk and enabled me to switch the startup disk back. What frightens me about this is that there is now the possibility for putting my laptop into a state where it can’t be fixed if I don’t have a specific CD with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had been going really well for a long time. I have had no computer problems for months now. Then, in the span of 24 hours, I managed to kill two computers by not doing anything out of the ordinary. What’s amazing is that the two computers in question were both Macs. I first hosed … <\/p>\n