Tagged: USB flash drive

Lion forgets its boot drive

MacBook Pro at the desktop.
Image via Wikipedia

I had a friend who has a new MacBook Pro and called me this morning panicked. His MBP started up and said “Could not find a bootable drive” or something like that. I had him restart and hold down the option button and then select his boot drive. Then he went to the System Preferences > Startup Disk and selected his drive. He shut down the computer. Then started it up and it started normally. He had upgraded from the most updated Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

I am going to help him burn a USB drive and do a clean install. It was a negative experience and one that I don’t recall any other version of Mac OS doing. The Mac OS has some great features, but when there is a bug, there is a show stopping bug. Apple doesn’t go halfway with features or with issues.

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Error message: Failure to install lion. Hard drive irreparably damaged.

ESSEN, GERMANY - JANUARY 09: Installation art...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Interesting that a permissions problem could cause this. This seems like something way worse than what is really is. Sort of like life sometimes I guess.

Lion is now installed on my machine. Two previous failed installations. After each failed installation I ran disk verify from the original sl disk in the cd drive. I had to erase and reformat the drive and restore from time machine.

The successful installation: I ran disk verify before the lion install and from the cd. No errors. But then I also ran permissions verify and repaired any issues. Then I re downloaded and installed Lion with success.

There had been no reported permissions issue previously but verify found issues. Don’t know if this is the issue on my machine but fixing it preceded the successful installation of Lion. Perhaps it will help some one else.

via.

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Disk Drill 1.3.123 & new video tutorial! « CleverFiles – KnowledgeBase

Disk Utility
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Disk Drill 1.3.123 & new video tutorial! « CleverFiles – KnowledgeBase. Some exciting upgrades. This new version is faster by up to 20%. Click on the link above to see the other details and see a video about everything Disk Drill can do.

S.M.A.R.T really does work. I had a situation once where the hard drive was making strange clicking sounds but still working normally. Disk Utility said that S.M.A.R.T had a problem so I backed it up. It failed in a matter of hours. Since many people don’t know to look in Disk Utility, this is a great feature that helps prevent needing its recovery features.

Of course the other option is to spend hundreds of dollars for a NAS with multiple drives, and redundant hot-swapping. Most people aren’t open to that kind of investment, so this seems like a good way to save money as well.

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