This past Saturday morning, I woke up to a very unpleasant feeling. My computer wouldn't boot up.
Using my cellphone, I found a step-by-step guide on what to do.
1) I ran Disk Utility, and 'repaired' the disk.
It wouldn't reboot.
2) I restarted in 'Safe Mode.'
It wouldn't reboot.
3) I restarted in "Single User Mode," and entered: fsck -fy until I received the message "the volume...appears to be ok."
It wouldn't reboot. (But I did enjoy the geeky thrill of taking my Mac to a unix command line.)
4) I reinstalled the OS. [In years past this would have meant searching for the install disks. Now the computer downloads the software over the internet.]
It rebooted! What a relief. The next step was taking the computer to the "Genius Bar" at the local Apple Store, and I am glad that I was able to avoid that. For now, at least. The computer is only three years old, so hopefully she has a few more miles in her.
Throughout this ordeal I wasn't nervous about my data. It's backed up regularly through Apple's Time Machine. I knew the last full backup had taken place Friday evening, so there would have been no lost data if I had to erase the drive and restore from the backup. That's a good feeling to have.
Image Source: "The First Page," by Émile Bayard (1837-1891). An illustration for the novel, Ninety-three, by Victor Hugo.
Émile Bayard's best known illustration is his image of Cosette sweeping the floor of the inn, for the novel, Les Misérables.
I back up genealogical data using a flash drive, a cloud service and an online genealogy service. Among those three It's relatively secure.
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