Technical Difficulties

Recently a friend gave me an extra copy of Left 4 Dead he had ordered so that I could play alongside him online. Because games don’t run so hot in VMWare, I repartitioned my hard drive to allow Boot Camp to do its thing. The dual-boot seems to work and I get to gaming. So far so good.

Co-op zombie apocalypse fun for ages 17 and up!

But signs had already started appearing that not all was well: during the Boot Camp process, I noticed my filesystem had some issues that I (wrongly) believed were fixable. I ran a repair utility and kept on gaming, forgetting anything was ever wrong.

The next day before work, I rebooted into OS X so I could load the latest episode of our president-elect’s weekly radio podcast onto my iPhone. Strangely, iTunes claimed my install was corrupted. Yeah, whatever. I download the latest iTunes .dmg and mount it, even letting the checksum complete (yeah, I’m usually impatient and skip this part). The installer does its thing for a while before erroring out with a message telling me the install media is damaged. Um, no. No it’s not. Now I know something’s up.

So I pass on my weekly episode of Obamarama and head off to work, shutting down my computer to save power. I get home late (after nine) and boot up the old girl so read my news and mail. No chime (this has been broken for a while), then grey screen, then Apple logo, then spinner, then…

I hear all my drives spin down and the machine die. What? This isn’t supposed to happen. I try to reboot into Windows XP. Well, that works. I try OS X again: no luck.

I’ve got good backups in place so I won’t be losing any crucial data, but all my website development tools are in OS X and I’m not about to start working in Windows XP. So the planned site update for this weekend isn’t going to happen. Instead, I’ll be increasing the frequency I post to the blog, so stay tuned.