Kernel Panic, TimeMachine to the Rescue!

A couple weeks ago I sat down at my computer after dinner to do a little bit of work and was greeted with a very, very sluggish machine. This isn’t normal with my Macbook so I tried shutting down a few applications and pull up Activity Monitor to see what was chewing up the cycles. This seemed to be too much for the machine and it completely locked up, what next? Well, the only thing I could do, hold down the power button until it shut off and try turning it back on (did you try turning it off and on again?).

At this point I wasn’t too worried, and sat waiting for OS X to load. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting. It just sat there spinning away. This is quite the dilemma. I hopped onto my iPhone and Goggled to see if there was a way to start up to a command prompt. I found this link which had a bunch of information, including holding command-s to boot to single user mode.

Off and On again, this time booting to single user mode and the command prompt. The same link mentioned running ‘/sbin/fsck’ (file system check) to fix any problems with the file system. I ran it. A billion errors, half a billion couldn’t be fixed. Great… Well, it says you may need to run it multiple times to fix everything, so I run it again. And again. And again. Shit.

Maybe I should try reseting the PRAM like this link says. Off and On again. Kernel Panic. Off and On. Kernel Panic. Shit. (Kernel Panic is the OS X equivalent to a Windows Blue Screen. They are rare so it is likely you have never seen one, but you can check it out here)

Well, now I’m screwed. At least I have Apple Care, into the Mac shop it goes.

“Did you try turning it Off and On again?”, she asks.
“Yep. I tried running the file system check, I tried reseting the PRAM and I turned it Off and On a dozen times,” I told her.
“Well, I’ll just try reseting the PRAM,” she said. “Oh, ya, Kernel Panic. That’s not good. We’ll take a look and let you know what we can do.”

Later that day, the Mac Store calls. “You need a new hard drive, we’ll be sending your old one to Apple and probably get a new one in 3-5 business days.”
“You don’t have them in stock?” I asked.
“No, we don’t stock the brand Apple uses and to keep it covered by the warranty we have to use one of theirs,” the girl from The Mac Store says.

Four days later and I’m bringing my Macbook home with it’s fresh new hard drive. I pop in my Snow Leopard disk and watch some TV while OS X reinstalls. Once it finishes I’m asked if I want to import user settings or restore from a Time Machine backup. Hell Yes, I’ll restore from the Time Machine backups I started doing ONE WEEK EARLIER! A couple hours later and I could barely remember that my hard drive had failed and I had a new one in my machine. All my Applications were restored. All my settings. Heck, even my desktop wallpaper came back.

The only thing that I had to reinstall was parallels, and that’s because I ignored the folder where the Windows VM was saved (it seems like it wouldn’t have worked from a restore anyways). The moral of the story is spend $60 on a 500 gig hard drive and USE Time Machine. I’ve ignored a number of places on my machine to keep the backup a little smaller and taking less time, you can do the same (with my setup it is PROVEN that you can still restore and get everything back):

~/.Trash
/.Trashes
/Library/Audio
~/Library/Caches
/Library/Caches
~/Downloads
~/Movies
~/Documents/Parallels
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts

Currently I have 20 days of backups and 300 gigs remaining on the drive. Do it.

I have to note that my little dialog with the girl at the Mac shop was a little contrived. They were actually really helpful and did a great job bringing my Macbook (and me) back to life.