Working on my newish MBP today I noticed it beachballing like crazy. So I pointed Disk Utilities at the boot drive and kept working. After repairing permissions I had DU run a Verify Disk and the report instructed me to reboot into recovery mode and run DU / Repair Disk from there. It’s been years since I felt like I had to be suspicious of Apple’s maintenance toolkit so I just toddled off and did that last thing before bed.

DU couldn’t repair the drive and suggested a hasty immediate backup followed by a wipe and restore or reinstall. No problem, thinks I, and went to reboot the machine into the main partition.

Naturally, it won’t. 

Casting about for the external boot drive I used to set the machine up a few months ago I am surprised to note, oops, I cannibalized them when I finally bumped us all over to Yosemite, two years after that vesion of the OS was released. I do still have the original bootable Mavericks drive that was migrated up to Yosemite in August or whenever it was, so I can rebuild from scratch, but fuck me, it’s Christmas! I won’t have time to do that for a fucking week.

The data I want and need and have been working with is all fine, my habitual local working directories are all mirrored to other machines in the house and I can just work from the Mac Pro downstairs to finish the specific deliverables I have for a client in the morning. So there’s some good news. But what a colossal pain in the ass, and what an idiot I am for not putting on the bakes and running a quick clone to an external drive before fucking around with the recovery tools. Lesson learned, I suppose. Yeesh.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *