Mac-Techs.com

• Keep your Mac out of the hands of strangers and children
• Always have one duplicate backup and one archive of your home directory, preferably off-site
• Keep some heavy duty file directory repair software at hand, like Alsoft Disk Warrior
• Buy products from known and trusted vendors
• Beware of vendors who bundle unknown products with your purchase, like 3rd party RAM included with your Mac from some other vendor
• Be gentle with your computer and treat it with respect in terms of its environment and handling
• Run Apple updates after a short period of time to see if there are any nasty bugs that early adopters run into
• Research updates and upgrades before attempting an OS overhaul, like moving from 10.4 to 10.6.
• Respect the way the Mac arranges data and don’t defeat it by moving files and folders without knowing what you are doing.
• Keep abreast of current technology – don’t wait until your hardware and software is way out of date so you suffer multiple problems trying to upgrade your systems all at once.
• Use experts when necessary – they’ve suffered through multiple problem solving sessions so they know where Mac experts fear to tread, and what to do if they have to go there.
• Use backups religiously. Make it a personal rule to understand what they do and how to do it correctly, or suffer from lost data and probable personal anguish when your data goes missing or your work flow is interrupted for hours, days or weeks.
• Get off your computer, take a walk, relax and enjoy life. It’s just a machine.

I’ve run into a new behavior that was a bit puzzling in Macs running OS X 10.5 or 10.6. The symptom is that when the machine starts up, the monitor displays the gray Apple for a couple of seconds, then the Mac shuts off totally.

On investigation, it seems that the hard drive directory would have an unrepairable problem on the index, something that Drive Utility could not fix. In OS X 10.5, and 10.6, the operating system does a file structure check at boot when the system was forced to shut down or suffered a freeze or anything other than a normal shut-down.

This directory structure check takes the form of a progress bar that shows up in 10.5 and 10.6. If this check fails right off the bat, the system shuts down right away to prevent damage to the HD from booting from an inoperable index.

It’s a great technique. The first time I saw the Mac shutting down, I wasn’t sure I understood what was happening, but now it’s confirmed, the OS is doing a preventative shutdown.

I got asked yesterday whether a client had enough disk space on their 1ghz TiBook. 15GB free space! 60GB total capacity. It wasn’t too long ago that 1 GB was the distant horizon of disk drives, nowadays 1 GB is the new 1 megabyte. So it goes.

Still, 1 GB is not an inconsiderable amount of room. I told them to relax and let me know when they were down to less than 5 GB. Maybe then it might be time to think about increasing capacity. Even then, there’s lots of room to be found by optimizing the drive, removing old files, removing unused cache files, deleting duplicates and things of that nature.

I think the real motivation for the question…they wanted a new MacBook and needed an excuse to get one.

I love using my Mac for its great useability, stability, style and terrific technology. However, I find myself in the Finder at times wishing things worked a little differently than they do. Specifically, the Finder, the navigation box, and applications all seem to have a different idea where the action is at.

For example, I’m working in the Finder. I navigate to a nested folder, find a file and double-click it. The correct application launches and the document opens. Now, perhaps I want to open a related document in the same folder or create and save a doc there. You would think the application’s File/Open navigation box would put me in that same folder.

Wrong. More often than not, it puts me soemwhere else in the file hierarchy, like in the Documents folder, or in the last folder it opened from. Multiply this behavior by two or more applications, and the Finder and pretty soon you are using a large proportion of your Mac time traversing folder hierarchies mumbling under your breath and wishing for an upgrade for your abacus.

Okay, so there’s a solution. Default Folder X by St. Clair Software is a terrific piece of software which puts standard navigation boxes to shame. The least of the things it can do is set up default folders for specific applications, show favorite folders in the nav box, let you traverse folder hierarchies right in the nav box using nested menus and do drag and drop of folders into the nav box. Great stuff. Todd sez, check it out.

 Apple’s Snow Leopard is an amazing piece of technology. As such, it’s fairly new and the many refinements and changes to the OS are still being discovered and sometimes tripped over by the user base. In my case, I’ve used Apple products since 1993 or thereabouts when I got my first Mac IIvi. And I’ve followed along, system upgrade after system upgrade.

Being an advanced user, it would follow that system upgrades would be the first thing I would install. As a Mac user, however, one realizes that this isn’t always the best or safest practice.

First comes compatibility issues. New operating systems usually break some tried-and-true software, and Snow Leopard is no different in that respect. Luckily, for me, I am not using any software Snow Leopard is incompatible with.

Having read all the good news about Snow Leopard, the advancements in multi-tasking, updated Quicktime, more stable Finder and so forth. I was ready for the plunge immediately.

One interesting change in OS X 10.6 over earlier versions….the installer does not allow you to do a clean install of the operating system. Archive and reinstall is the only option.

Which brings me to the subject of this author’s travail. After my upgrade, my system seemed to go through a short period of getting acquainted, and all seemed okay for awhile. However, over the past few weeks spinning rainbow wheels of doom and unexplained  hangs in applications led to repeated force shutdowns of my Mac mini.

I was increasingly concerned as my daily Mac usage began to turn into a forced reboot parade resembling the old OS 9 days. Typically, an application, often Firefox, would start the spinning wheel. The Finder would follow shortly thereafter and that was it. Force reboot was the only option as the machine would never shut down or restart on its own.

Finally I realized this was not going to get tweaked into working right. I started to reinstall Snow Leopard and was informed by the installer that my hard drive was not journaled.

Journaling is a way for the OS to keep track of read/writes to the hard drive, so if an operation is interrupted the data in transit can be restored if a corruption issue occurred. In this case, without journaling, my system was taking hits on the hard drive index every time I forced it to reboot.

How did the drive become ‘unjournaled’? Wish I knew. I rebooted, tried installing while starting from the DVD and the installer informed me that the drive was too corrupted to install a system on.

Okay…get out my Disk Warrior CD and reboot from that. This is where it gets really interesting. OS X now has a technique where if the computer is forced to reboot, a disk check sequence is initiated. If it fails, the machine shuts down.

I’ve never heard of this, never seen it on any technical Mac blog or site. So, it seemed to me that my machine was possibly damaged beyond repair.

Reboot, and this time use the EFI volume chooser trick (don’t ask) to boot from the Disk Warrior CD. Repair the drive. Reboot, install Snow Leopard successfully this time. Update to OS 10.6.1. Problem solved, machine is stable.

Moral of the story: don’t wait to reinstall the operating system. You’ll only prolong the agony.