Wow, what a long day. Still battling the MacBook Air. OS X Disk Utility changed it mind concerning the hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status from "Pending failure" to "Verified". I had to go find a trial version of a Mac disk utility that would more accurately report the S.M.A.R.T. status. I just now found SMARTReporter also, which is a free utility that periodically polls the status of the drive and reports on its health. It is ALWAYS better to know ahead of time when things are about to go south! Anyway, got an 80GB ZIF drive on the way so we can get it back on its feet. Very rare drive now, very tough to find.
We've been working on a MacBook 13.3" A1181 that was brought in with some mysterious ailment. We've got retail install disks for Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard and also original install media for Leopard for the MacBook. Various attempts to get something to install using the superdrive kept resulting in kernel panics and an instruction to power off the computer. Some of the media would take and would get just past the language selection window but would then report that "Mac OS X cannot be installed on this computer". Research into this took me down several roads. I won't report all the options, but they include checking for the proper partition format on the drive, creating new install media that has been somewhat modified to ensure it will accept the particular Mac you're trying to install it on, and connecting the computer to another Mac as a firewire target drive and installing it that way.
I checked the partition and it looked fine and was formatted as GUID, which is required for the Intel Based Macs. What I did notice when looking at the "Info" window was that the partition was "Partition 2" and contained 3 folders and 3 files, despite the fact that I had just erased it and told it to create a single partition. If you look at the partition tab in Disk Utility, you'll notice the "+" and "-" below the graphical representation of the partitions. I clicked on the "-" and applied that, which deleted the existing partition and left no volume whatsoever. I then recreated a single partition. This time, the partition was numbered "Partition 0". After doing this, I tried the OS 10.6 retail install media, which finally took. Yay!!! so, 30 minutes late, the MacBook rebooted and I was back to square on - kernel panic, need to power off. So depressing.
More research into kernel panics revealed that memory can often be the cause. Who would think? It ran find to install the OS and crashed during the reboot. It would seem that the memory was fine. So, I took out the memory anyway and found a white paste on the contacts of both bars (maybe it was supposed to be there) and I cleaned it off. Put one bar back in and restarted and voila, it continued the initial setup from the hard drive finally! It is now downloading the 1GB update for OS X.
I did try the firewire target method for installing the OS. It seemed to work great and even restarted and ran through the initialization of the OS, all through the other Mac. Very interesting. Shut it down, restarted it on its own, and kernel panic!
I also used SuperDuper! to create an exact copy (clone) of the functioning MacBook's drive onto the problem drive. When installed into the customer's Mac, nothing but grey showed up on the screen during the bootup. Tried the drive in my MacBook and it worked fine. Very frustrating. Maybe always associated with the memory issue, maybe it had something to do with the partition showing up as #2.
Daryn
Friday, November 5, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
No need to pay the $80 for a laptop AC adapter from Best Buy
At 9th Street Computer Cellar, we love it when we're able to help our customers save money, a lot of money. We get to do this all the time. Today, it was a matter of a customer coming to us with an older Toshiba tablet computer that had an AC adapter that had failed. The only option available at Best Buy was some type of universal adapter for $79.99. We sell those also (for about 1/2 the price), but we have junk drawers full of a variety of mixed adapters that we can try also.
So, we got to pull one out, get the customer's computer working immediately and also saved him about $60 in the process.
We offer a free 15-minute diagnostic, a time that we can look over a computer and see if there are any issues with it and possible solutions. Although we don't get a repair job out of the deal, it is a really good feeling when someone comes in with a self-diagnosed problem with the DC jack, the part your power plug sticks into and it turns out to be just a defective notebook AC adapter. Not many folks do that type of board level repair here in Durham, NC, but we do. First thing we always do though is test the AC adapter and see if that is the problem; sometimes, it is. In that case, the customer only has to pay for the AC adapter and can immediately walk out with their computer functioning, rather than having to leave it for a couple of days or more as originally planned.
Daryn
www.thecomputercellar.com
So, we got to pull one out, get the customer's computer working immediately and also saved him about $60 in the process.
We offer a free 15-minute diagnostic, a time that we can look over a computer and see if there are any issues with it and possible solutions. Although we don't get a repair job out of the deal, it is a really good feeling when someone comes in with a self-diagnosed problem with the DC jack, the part your power plug sticks into and it turns out to be just a defective notebook AC adapter. Not many folks do that type of board level repair here in Durham, NC, but we do. First thing we always do though is test the AC adapter and see if that is the problem; sometimes, it is. In that case, the customer only has to pay for the AC adapter and can immediately walk out with their computer functioning, rather than having to leave it for a couple of days or more as originally planned.
Daryn
www.thecomputercellar.com
MacBook Air with occasional delays and spinning colored disc
We worked on a MacBook Air today. Beautiful laptop, really, really thin. It was brought to us because its owner was frequently encountering the spinning, colored disc for a mouse pointer rather than the productivity that she'd prefer to encounter. It would occasionally make it a real bear to get anything typed.
While diagnosing it, the computer ran like a dream. I only encountered the spinning disc once. I was going down the antivirus install and scan path when I decided to take a chance at repairing the disk drive's permissions through Disk Utility. Once I got in there, I found that the 80GB hard drive was reporting imminent failure; the S.M.A.R.T. drive diagnostics must have seen the drive working really hard to get information from failing parts of the drive. This is a great tool and was very helpful in this case.
I installed my external HP 320GB hard drive to the single USB port and formatted it for Apple, then went to Time Machine and began a full backup to the external. This is really the best backup you can have - one that is not saved on the equipment itself. If the laptop's hard drive fails or the computer is stolen, you cannot get back to your information if you failed to back it up somewhere externally.
It turns out that the MacBook Air series use the tiny 1.8" IDE (ATA) hard drives with a ZIF connector. IDE drives in general are beginning to become rare, particularly if you're looking for new. Be prepared to fork out some bucks! We provide value by knowing who to go to get the best possible prices on the new parts that are required for our customer's repairs, but in this case we'll probably go with used equipment to try to keep costs reasonable. So, we've got to get the hard drive, install it and install Mac OS 10.5 using USB DVD drive, then restore the OS to her current configuration using the Time Machine.
An option would have been to use one of the disk cloning softwares available. Hands down, the most popular is the paid for SuperDuper! If you use both SuperDuper! and Time Machine together, you can really make recovery a cinch. Use nothing and you'll be crying useless tears over data you'll never get back after an equipment failure. We see it all the time, unfortunately.
Daryn
www.thecomputercellar.com
While diagnosing it, the computer ran like a dream. I only encountered the spinning disc once. I was going down the antivirus install and scan path when I decided to take a chance at repairing the disk drive's permissions through Disk Utility. Once I got in there, I found that the 80GB hard drive was reporting imminent failure; the S.M.A.R.T. drive diagnostics must have seen the drive working really hard to get information from failing parts of the drive. This is a great tool and was very helpful in this case.
I installed my external HP 320GB hard drive to the single USB port and formatted it for Apple, then went to Time Machine and began a full backup to the external. This is really the best backup you can have - one that is not saved on the equipment itself. If the laptop's hard drive fails or the computer is stolen, you cannot get back to your information if you failed to back it up somewhere externally.
It turns out that the MacBook Air series use the tiny 1.8" IDE (ATA) hard drives with a ZIF connector. IDE drives in general are beginning to become rare, particularly if you're looking for new. Be prepared to fork out some bucks! We provide value by knowing who to go to get the best possible prices on the new parts that are required for our customer's repairs, but in this case we'll probably go with used equipment to try to keep costs reasonable. So, we've got to get the hard drive, install it and install Mac OS 10.5 using USB DVD drive, then restore the OS to her current configuration using the Time Machine.
An option would have been to use one of the disk cloning softwares available. Hands down, the most popular is the paid for SuperDuper! If you use both SuperDuper! and Time Machine together, you can really make recovery a cinch. Use nothing and you'll be crying useless tears over data you'll never get back after an equipment failure. We see it all the time, unfortunately.
Daryn
www.thecomputercellar.com
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