What to do when Mac OS X crashes on you...

[Justin1524]

So last night I had a session, go to boot up my Mac Pro and can't get it to boot - got past the Apple screen but then it just flashed blue on the screen repeatedly without going to the Finder screen. Panic set in as I had people waiting to record. First thing I did was restart the machine by holding the power button to shut it off, wait a few seconds and press it again, wait for the chime then hold down shift. This will (in my case it did) boot the machine without any extensions/resources. Next thing I tried was going to the Disk Utility App and repairing permissions. This didn't work for me when I rebooted. Finally, I rebooted and held down (after the chime) Command-R. Miraculously, a special boot screen came up with the option to re-install OS X over the internet! This is way, way cool as who wants to search around for installer DVDs (not me). It took about 1 hour (maybe slightly longer) but when done, whallaa! I was back in business everything worked great! This is testimony to how Apple has made life a whole lot easier - perfect recovery. And BTW, while I don't bother with backing up my boot drive, I religiously backup my work to other network drives after every sessions. Just thought I'd share this story in case it may help someone.

[Stig Eliassen]

Good to hear, Justin. Thanks for sharing.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by Justin1524

So last night I had a session, go to boot up my Mac Pro and can't get it to boot - got past the Apple screen but then it just flashed blue on the screen repeatedly without going to the Finder screen.

The launchd process (PID 1) had started. launchd was unsuccessful in starting either the WindowServer or the loginwindow processes.

Originally Posted by Justin1524

Panic set in as I had people waiting to record. First thing I did was restart the machine by holding the power button to shut it off, wait a few seconds and press it again, wait for the chime then hold down shift. This will (in my case it did) boot the machine without any extensions/resources.

This is true for any Mac OS X system. By holding the shift key at startup, you initiate a safe boot process. When you get the Apple logo with the spinning gear, that screen stays present longer than usual because it is deleting and rebuilding cache files. It also runs fsck (think Disk Utility's Verify Disk command) and disables any third party kernel extensions.

Originally Posted by Justin1524

Next thing I tried was going to the Disk Utility App and repairing permissions. This didn't work for me when I rebooted. Finally, I rebooted and held down (after the chime) Command-R. Miraculously, a special boot screen came up with the option to re-install OS X over the internet!

This only happens with Lion and Mountain Lion.

Originally Posted by Justin1524

This is way, way cool as who wants to search around for installer DVDs (not me). It took about 1 hour (maybe slightly longer) but when done, whallaa! I was back in business everything worked great! This is testimony to how Apple has made life a whole lot easier - perfect recovery.

Did you try holding the option key during startup and booting off of the Recovery HD partition?

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[Hugh-H]

Hello Justin,

That's an interesting perspective on the Internet Restore - we have exactly the opposite reaction.

We deal in large commercial television applications and when a workstation crashes we often don't have the bandwidth to download a full install from Apple in anything short of a ridiculously long period of time, meanwhile we've lost a huge amount of money because they aren't going to wait for us. We ship all our systems with clone drives and time machine drives; if the system refuses to boot we can boot off the clone drive.

We and others in our position strongly dislike the fact that OS10.8 does not have install dvds, this limits us still further because we are completely reliant on our clone drives. We'd happily pay extra for those dvds but Apple has moved further from professional users and real world environments where downloading 4+GB over the internet before you can start to install is not acceptable and will cost us money.

Good to hear you've recovered.
Hugh

[Tweakhead]

Simple solution. Buy a $5 USB stick and restore your OSX installer to it. You then have a bootable installer same as a DVD.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianki...ble-usb-drive/

Then buy a 32GB USB stick for $16 and clone your fully configured Pro Tools system drive to it once it is all working properly. You can then recover from any situation quickly and easily. Carbon Copy Cloner.
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/703...on-copy-cloner

[Chief Technician]

Our systems have the drive in Bay 4 of the Mac Pro as a system clone. If the Macintosh HD were to suffer a catastrophe, we would just restart off of the clone and get back to work.

[Hugh-H]

Hello Tweakhead,
We already use CCC as our clone solution.
Hugh

[groundcontrol]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

Our systems have the drive in Bay 4 of the Mac Pro as a system clone. If the Macintosh HD were to suffer a catastrophe, we would just restart off of the clone and get back to work.

This is another situation where the much maligned iLok shines for professional users.

[Hugh-H]

Hello,
We all hate the copy protection annoyances but if it must be there we prefer the iLok/eLicenser usb schemes. Instant recovery. Just lock them down - they walk away on their own apparently.
Hugh

[groundcontrol]