Mac woes
I’d been trying to work out why Mail.app hadn’t been working for the last two days. I was getting error -108XX error (don’t remember the code and you’ll see in a minute why I can’t just look it up). Basically the code is “unknown error”. Although some people had translated it as running out of process space (I really don’t understand how they managed that). Console also showed that Mail.app was SIGBUS erroring (generally a memory access violation type of issue).
I had installed Mail.app from the Leopard install disk, but that hadn’t fixed the problem. On a whim I though I’d reinstall the jumbo patch for 10.5.1. Lo and behold, Mail.app now started fine.
Then my menu bar disappeared. Sigh. Let’s restart the Macbook. Three finger salute to get the force quit dialog didn’t work, none of the icons on the dock worked, so it was a complete power down. It’s rare I have to do this, but I’m usually OK if I do, HFS+ journal replay works great. But this time I was a little apprehensive; see about two weeks back my file system had been trashed by the OS (or so I thought). Time machine restore worked a treat, but I hadn’t backed up in about a week, so some emails and other things had been lost (you can bet I’m going to buy iTimeCapsule, as well as a .mac subscription to sync up mail as a backup onto my Mac mini).
Powering up, everything looked OK, but when I press my ID to get the password prompt, nada. OK, let’s go for another forced power down. And here is where I discover what’s been going on. As the machine starts to power up, I hear, coming from the hard drive the dreaded “clunk … clunk” of a total failure. My drive is dead.
It’s now dawned on me that the real reason my file system was fried two weeks back, and that Mail.app was failing so badly, was my hard drive was on it’s way south. Now that it’s gone, I know what the problem is, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Until the replacement drive I’ve ordered arrives, I’m sans MacBook. This thing is my baby, my workhorse. I’m lost with out it. Woe indeed.
I mean, I had to write this blog on a Windows machine. That’s just sick !