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.
