Tag Archives: troubleshooting

A Clean Slate

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I prepare to wipe my main computer’s hard disk clean and reinstall everything I need from scratch.

If you’ve been following these blogs, you know that my production computer, a 2-year-old dual processor Macintosh G5, has been feeling poorly these days. The symptoms are a general sluggishness, especially when accessing the hard disk. Last week it went comatose and required the intervention of an Apple Genius to be revived. The Genius suggested that I back up the hard disk. He gave me the impression that he expected the problem to reoccur.

My hard disk is backed up — at least my home folder is — in two places. And my important files, like accounting records, address book, etc., are backed up in yet another place. I’ve been burned by hard disk failures twice in the past. Anyone who doesn’t learn their lesson the first time should give up using computers.

I purchased two Macintosh disk recovery tools just in case the computer dies again: TechTool Pro and Disk Warrior. I can’t remember which one the Genius recommended, so I got them both. In all honesty, I should have had them in the first place. There’s no reason I should have to drive all the way down to the Phoenix area to fix a hard disk problem. And believe me, the $120 investment is worth it if it saves me that long drive and wasted day.

But since the symptoms persist and they’re quite annoying, I’ve decided on a major medical procedure: hard disk reformat. I would have done it last week when I got the computer back, but the Geniuses at Apple forgot to give back the Tiger disc that was in the computer’s disc drive when I dropped it off for revival. I finally got it in the mail yesterday.

So today’s the day.

Now although it seems like a lot of work, it’s well worth it. By reformatting the hard disk, I’ll wipe it clean and realign all those magnetic particles on its surface. The directories, which are damaged (possibly beyond repair) will be gone and can be rebuilt from scratch. And in the unlikely event that there’s a virus on the computer, it’ll be wiped away, too. I’ll lay down all the software from original program discs as I need them.

I’ve done this before. In fact, I used to do this on all my computers whenever there was a new release of the system software. But that was back in the days when the OS took up a few dozen megabytes of hard disk space. Not a few gigabytes. Ditto for the software.

It’ll defintely be an inconvenience. I’ll start by installing only the software I use all the time: Office, Photoshop, iLife. Then, when I need to use a program I don’t use frequently, I’ll have to install it the first time I use it.

I’m not going to install Mac OS 9. I don’t use Classic applications anymore and don’t want to waste hard disk space on it. (For readers of my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guides: don’t expect to see the Classic environment covered in the next edition. It’s getting pulled out to make room for the new stuff. That book is just too darn fat.)

As for my documents, they should all be in my Home folder. (Let’s hope, right?) So I can just copy the Home folder backup’s contents to the new Home folder and my documents should be all ready to go.

Of course, if this doesn’t fix the symptoms, I’ll be pretty annoyed. And I’ll also be out of guesses as to what could be causing it.

My next new computer will be one of the Intel processor machines Apple is currently developing. But not an iMac. I need something a bit meatier for my daily work, something that’ll last 2- 3 years. I also plan to to replace my 12″ PowerBook with a new Intel chip Mac laptop, but not until they come out with a 12″ version. I like my laptop to be small.

So now you know what I’ll be doing today. Wish me luck!

Computer Woes (Again)

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My computer’s hard drive starts forgetting where it put things. Important things.

In the 20-20 vision of hindsight, I guess I can say that the problem started a while ago. The most obvious symptom was programs “unexpectedly quitting” a lot more frequently than they should have. Mail was especially lazy; it would quit several times a day. Word and Dreamweaver weren’t doing their best either.

But I was in denial. The problem wasn’t on my computer. It was something in the operating system. It was Apple’s fault.

Yeah, right.

The next symptom was the spinning beachball. If you’ve used a Mac for a while, you know that a spinning ball appears when you need to wait for the computer to do something. (Macs are a bit more sophisticated than PCs, which still use hourglasses to mark time.) The problem is, my computer has dual G5 processors and I don’t run much software that puts a strain on them. The ball shouldn’t appear as often as it was or for as long.

Then, on Monday, I had the big problem. The computer seemed to lock up. I did a Command-Option-Esc (like a Control-Alt-Delete on a PC) and saw in the rather long list of running applications that the Finder was not responding. So I clicked the button to restart the Finder. It evidently decided that it wanted to permanently quit because it never came back. And, with the Finder gone, nothing else wanted to work either.

Dang!

I held the power button in until the computer shut down. I waited, then powered it back up. While it was starting up, I made lunch: chicken salad with dried cranberries and nuts. I put it in the fridge for later and looked up at my computer. All I saw was a white screen with an Apple logo. And that’s all that had been showing since I started making lunch.

Uh-oh.

I tried restarting again. Same result.

I managed to get the DVD drive door open. I shoved my Tiger DVD into it — after spending ten minutes locating it in the mess that’s my office. I restarted with the C key held down. The DVD drive spun and the computer started up.

Whew! At least it wasn’t the motherboard again.

The Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installer appeared. I used the menu to choose Disk Utility. That’s the software you use to check and repair hard disk problems. The program launched, then attempted to read my hard disk. Three minutes later, it was still trying. It had been at it for about six minutes when I decided to restart again.

Bad idea. I was back to the white screen with the Apple logo.

Sh*t.

I disconnected everything except the power and monitor and tried again. No go. So I disconnected the power and the monitor, got my stuff together, and lugged the computer down to the car. I had my Honda at work and I don’t mind driving that down to Phoenix. But I was wearing my glasses so I couldn’t wear sunglasses and the day was very bright. To make matters worse, I was wearing my chili pepper pants, which are very loud and tend to make me stand out — in a bad way — in a crowd. But surely that didn’t matter. I didn’t want to go home to change. So I took off down the Phoenix Highway, heading for the Biltmore Apple Store.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here. It’s boring and you’ll think I’m whining. But I will say that the Apple Store was mobbed and that the waiting list for the Genius Bar was full. I could get an appointment for 6:40 PM. It was just before noon. When I told an employee I had just driven 70 miles from Wickenburg, his response was “So?” I couldn’t believe his rudeness. He then told me that if I spent $99 to buy a Pro Care membership, I’d go right to the front of the line. Of course, there were about 20 people on line to buy things and, by that time, I was fuming with anger. So I decided to try my luck at the Chandler Apple Store.

That was another 20 or so miles farther away, off the Loop 101. Same story, but I could get an appointment for 7:30 there. And someone explained that a Pro membership wouldn’t help me if the line was already filled up. The creep at Biltmore had lied to me.

I was very annoyed. Put yourself in my shoes. I’ve spent the past sixteen or so years writing about Macintosh computers. Dozens of books. I have purchased, with my own money, more than a dozen Macs during that time: Mac IIcx, SE/30 (2 of them; don’t ask), PowerMac 6100, PowerMac 8500, G3 beige, G4 (my current Web server), G5 dual (the patient), PowerBook 2400c, iBook SE, PowerBook G4 (my faithful 12″ laptop), Strawberry iMac, eMac (my current test mule), and 20th Anniversary Mac. I’ve spent more money on Apple hardware than anyone else I know. And no, I don’t still have all those computers. But I do have most of them.

I also bought a Newton, a QuickTake (which I sold) and 3 iPods.

Hell, I’m even a stockholder. (But I’m not complaining about that. The 200 shares I own have a basis of less than $4 per share. Last I looked, Apple was trading at $71 per share.)

And here I am with a dead computer, unable to write the three book proposals I need to get to my editor (I’m trying to line up my spring workload), and I can’t even get service at an Apple Store — a store, by the way, that I’ve done three presentations at over the past two years.

I spoke to the manager. I told him about the rudeness I’d experienced at the Biltmore store. He was fair but firm. The best they could do was “check in” my computer and try to get to it today or early tomorrow.

I had no other choice so I left it there.

They sent a guy out to my car with a dolly. G5s are very heavy computers. I think there’s lead in there. He pulled the computer out of my trunk, put it on the dolly, and wheeled it in. He was friendly and sympathetic. Not rude.

I gave my information to a girl who printed up a receipt for the computer. She promised to call sometime the next day.

I left the store, grabbed a sandwich from Paradise Bakery in the mall, and headed out to the car. I drove home, top down, stopping at the Desert Ridge Mall to pick up a new fish filter and a bunch of feeder fish for my big fish to eat.

I hit traffic, of course. I don’t know how anyone can live down there. You can’t drive anywhere in the valley without running into some traffic jam that doesn’t appear to be caused by anything other than driver stupidity.

Jeep TourThe next day, I had to do a Jeep tour with the local Jeep tour company. Whenever they have a big group, they ask me to drive. I take the doors off my Jeep, put a saddle blanket over the dog hair on the back seat, and join in for a slow drive in the desert with vacationers. This group was farmers from Indiana. I guess they can’t farm when the place is covered with blowing snow. I thought the tour was 2 hours, but it worked out to be nearly 3-1/2 hours. Didn’t matter much. My computer was on a bench in Chandler.

I went home and played with my PowerBook. I installed a random header image on wickenburg-az.com. It’s a cool feature with 12 images appearing randomly at the top of each page.

I got a message on my cell phone. The computer was fixed. I could pick it up. But I might want to back everything up as soon as possible, the guy added.

Hmm.

Mike works down near there and I called him up. He went to Chandler and picked it up. He dropped it off in the office this morning. I plugged everything in and fired it up.

It worked.

But it worked just like it worked before it died. I don’t think they did much to it. Maybe a little smelling salts.

I think it needs its hard disk reformatted and all the software reinstalled. I used to do that to all my computers once a year. That was in the days when all my documents could fit on a single CD. Not today, when my documents take up 25 GB of my hard disk (I archive old books and other work onto CD when they’re done). I know that’s nothing compared to the folks that do multimedia work, but it’s still a lot. And reformatting my hard drive annually would be a royal pain in the butt.

Just like it will be next week, when I do it.

I have to wait until next week. The folks at Apple gave Mike the computer, but they didn’t give him the Tiger DVD that was stuck in its drive. I don’t have operating system software to install. So I have to wait until they mail the disc to me. I should get it by Friday, Saturday at the latest.

So you know what I’m doing on Monday morning.

And today I ordered DiskWarror and TechTools. Next time this happens, I’ll stay home and avoid the traffic.

MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, eBay Shopping

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Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping. This episode is a hodgepodge of information related to my podcasting efforts and the trouble it has been giving me lately. You can find the transcript of this podcast in the “Call Me a Geek” area of Maria’s WebLog. The easiest way to find that is to click the link on my home page, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Let’s start with the MPEG-4 lessons. If you’ve been following my podcasts, you know that I’ve begun creating the occasional enhanced podcast. Enhanced podcasts include images and links and are saved in MPEG-4 format with a .m4a extension. My other podcasts are saved in MP3 format with a .mp3 extension.

Podcast publishing is not exactly a simple task — well, not when you do it the way I do. After recording, editing, and saving the audio file, I then log into Blogger where I create a blog entry for the podcast. There’s a link field that I fill out with the URL for the audio file’s location on a server. I put a short blurb about the episode in the entry and publish it.

Publishing the entry on Blogger does two things. First, it creates the Maria Speaks home page. That’s the plain old Web page you see when you browse www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks. Then it creates an XML feed file called atom.xml, in the same location as the home page. This feed file has all the codes necessary for podcatching software — like iTunes and a bunch of others I really don’t know — to see and download the new audio files.

But that’s not what most subscribers use to access my podcast. They use my Feedburner feed. Every 30 minutes or so, Feedburner’s software checks out my atom.xml file to see if it has changed. If it has, it revises its version of my xml feed file, which can be found at feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks. That’s the file most subscribers subscribe to and it’s the one with all the bells and whistles to make sure my podcast entries appear correctly in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere.

Sound confusing? It is, in a way. But I don’t usually have to deal with too much of it. As I said, I create and save the audio file, then create and publish the corresponding blog entry. Blogger, Feedburner, and subscriber’s software does the rest.

My MPEG-4 lesson started yesterday. Well, in all honestly, it started about four months ago, but I didn’t realize it then. Back then, it was a problem getting my podcasts to work. But I changed the way I was doing things and it started to work, so I assumed I’d been doing it wrong in the first place. Actually, I wasn’t.

Here’s the symptom: my enhanced podcasts weren’t accessible from the Maria Speaks podcast. Anyone trying to access the file from the Maria Speaks home page by clicking the entry name got an error message. File not found. And there was no attachment to either version of the xml feed file.

The regular podcasts were fine.

Thus began my troubleshooting exercise. I zeroed in on the difference in the file name extensions and started researching. To make a long story short, I discovered that in order for me to include m4a files in my podcasts, I had to set up a MIME mapping on the server to identify the m4a extension’s type as audio/MPEG.

If you’re completely lost, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the kind of thing most computer users need to deal with. I certainly don’t. Fortunately, I have a server in my office that I can set up MIME mapping. I added the appropriate entry, moved my m4a files over to that server, fixed the URLs in Blogger, republished, resynced Feedburner, and everything began working fine.

I’m still trying to find out if the server space I have on GoDaddy.com can be modified to add the MIME mapping I need there. I’d much rather serve from that server than the one in my office.

So that was my MPEG-4 lesson.

Server woes started this morning. I was still fiddling around with the MPEG-4 files and was very surprised to see that the folder on my GoDaddy server that I’d been using to store my MP3 files was gone. I mean gone like it was never there. And oddly enough, two folders that I thought I’d deleted were back. What the heck was going on?

I assumed that I’d accidentally deleted the missing folder and was mistaken about the other two folders. After all, I’ve been busy lately with my QuickBooks book and a bunch of unexpected helicopter charters. I was obviously being careless. So I rebuilt the missing folder from backup files on my iDisk and went to work.

All the way to work — it’s a ten-minute drive — I thought about my carelessness. And when I got to my office, I did some more research. What I soon realized was that all of the space on my GoDaddy server had been reverted to the way it looked on October 10. Over a month ago. What the heck was going on?

I called GoDaddy technical support and was fortunate enough to have a tech guy answer right away. I told him the symptoms. We did some brainstorming, using the info we both had. We soon discovered that on October 10, I’d requested a change from a Windows server to a Linux server. For some reason, it had taken GoDaddy five weeks to process the change. In the meantime, I kept uploading files to the Windows server when the Linux server was already set up but not accessible to my account. Last night, GoDaddy switched my access to the Linux server, which hadn’t been updated since I requested the change. So I was suddenly faced with a server that hadn’t been updated for five weeks and access to the server I’d been using all along was completely cut off.

Well, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I was using the server space for a Web site. I keep backup copies of all my Web site on my main production computer. If a Web site’s directory or disk is trashed, I can have it replaced in a matter of minutes. But the only thing I use this server for is storing my podcasting files. Not just for Maria Speaks but for KBSZ-AM’s Around the Town radio show, which is broadcast every weekday. When GoDaddy made its change, it wiped out about 20 podcast files.

The really tragic part of all this is that I’d been saving all those podcast audio files on my PowerBook’s hard disk. Two days ago, I got an onscreen message saying I was running out of disk space. Well, why not delete some of those podcasts, I asked myself. After all, I can always get new copies from the server.

Two days later, of course, I couldn’t.

Well, the GoDaddy tech guy was very helpful. He told me they’d do a server restore for the Windows server and copy the files in my directory there to the Linux server. Although GoDaddy usually charges $150 for this service, they admitted that they were at least partially at fault for the screw-up and waived the fee. Now I just have to wait up to 10 days for the files to reappear. And, when that happens, I have to re-upload any files I uploaded to the server between yesterday at midnight and the day the server is restored. Like this podcast.

Oh, and I did lose one of my enhanced podcast episodes. It was one of my better ones, too: Mac and Windows File Sharing. It was on my .

Mac disk space, which I also cleaned up in an effort to get rid of unneeded files. So if you have a copy of it — that’s the version with the m4a file extension — please send it to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’d really like to put it back online for the latecomers here. The lesson I learned in this ordeal is that I must have a copy of every single file I want to make available on a server. If I’d had all my files, I could have just restored the server back to its original condition and got on with my life. And not bore you with this story.

SmartDiskWhat’s weird about this is that I considered the server my backup and I deleted the originals, depending on the backup. If you recall my famous NaNoWriMo podcast episode, you’ll remember how I spoke about the importance of backups. Yeah, well the originals are important, too. Which brings me to the final topic of this podcast: eBay shopping. I’ve been surfing eBay for the past two weeks, trying to get a deal on a portable FireWire hard disk. The idea is to use the external hard disk to store all my media files, thus keeping them off my PowerBook’s internal hard disk, which is only 40GB. SmartDisk makes a drive called the FireLite and I figure I can get an 80GB model for about $130. There’s plenty to choose from, all in unopened boxes. But I seem to have the worst timing; I’ve lost about a dozen auctions in the past two weeks. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually bid on two of them at a time, knowing I can’t possibly win both.

That’s the same technique I used to snag a new iSight camera this week. I put the same bid on both cameras. I won one and lost the other. Fine with me. I figure I’ll bring the camera home and use it on my laptop for a Webcam and for iChat. I might also do some video podcasting — but don’t hold your breath on that.

My other big eBay acquisition is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. It’s about half the price on eBay as it is in the Apple Store. Sealed boxes, unregistered. Sounds almost too good to be true. We’ll see.

The server, of course, is so I can finally get rid of WebSTAR and do some serious Web hosting on my server. I’ll bore you with that in another blog entry.

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something from this mess. Thanks for listening!