Mac troubles, part two

Issues with my Mac continued, and the backup failed several times — I checked the problematic file, deleted it, and then tried again. No avail.

On Tuesday, I made a full copy of my working files to a server in the network. Then I continued to rescue my hard disk, finally getting into situation in which my Mac would not boot — except into single mode. Apple’s disk “repair” program “repaired” my disk into an unusable state. It was readable in single user mode, but OS X’s graphical front-end was broken on the disk, due to a bad block.

I had to purchase a new hard drive, that fortunately was available in 24 hours, and install the whole system again. This took most part of Wednesday afternoon and evening. I got the system up and running just before midnight, when the Time Machine backup was restored.

I installed OS X first from scratch, and then restored the backup. This resulted a situation that some of the settings, such as contents of /etc directory were not restored. Some settings, like my custom keyboard was restored with no issues. I copied the old contents of /etc to my desktop, and I have since then copied stuff to the current /etc when something is not working as expected.

I would probably have avoided this issue by running restore while installing the OS. When everything was done, it was too late to start from scratch.

My computer is now faster than earlier, so probably the disk has been somewhat broken for some time.

This is now third or fourth disk trouble that we’ve experienced in the company during this autumn. Either we have had really bad luck, or Apple’s quality is deteriorating. I suspect the latter, as some of my friends have experienced similar issues with their laptops.

Further, HFS+ sucks as a file system. It cannot recover itself from a bad block, and the tools to fix disk issues are really bad. They cannot do much and then they don’t tell you anything informative. Time Machine is extremely bad in the latter sense. There’s never any reasons why the backup failed. Is it so hard to make a couple of informative error messages.

It’s sad that ZFS project went bust, as Apple needs to have a better filesystem. And they should also invest a bit more money to have better quality hard drives. These issues — along other hardware issues that we’ve experienced in the past — should not occur with hardware priced like Apple’s.