I should have known better

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:49:19 +0100

I've just finished a very lengthy restore of the system disk of my MacBook Pro.

I've noticed my MBP has been a little sluggish lately and, according to hfsdebug, free space was very highly fragmented.

I thought this might be a good time to try out the Drive Genius defragger. You can probably see where this story is heading.

Spoiling the end I first did a complete clone with SuperDuper to a firewire disk.

Then I rebooted with the Drive Genius boot DVD and did a full disk scan to ensure that there were no bad blocks reported on the this, which there were not.

Then I set the defragger running.

It took hours. Given my disk is 148GB I knew it wouldn't be fast but I never imagined it could be this slow. The last 5% were positively glacial, e.g. it would say it was copying 1 block and that would take >30s.

But I let it finish and, eventually, it said all done.

I restarted and went to make another cup of coffee... on my return I found the Mac was still at the gray screen and hosting spinning petal of doom.

I wondered if maybe there some kind of cache being rebuilt or something (you know, the kind of thing you're prepared to believe if you're desperate) and went away for a while longer.

I came back with a heavy heart and, sure enough, the petal was still spinning.

But this has happened to me before, no big deal I thought. I cycled the power and brought the system back in verbose mode.

All seemed well until I saw a message about "CPU halted" and it powered itself down. What the fuck? We repeated this process 2 or 3 times until I figured it wasn't going away and rebooted in Single User mode.

Now I could see messages about HFS corruption on the system disk.

I booted the Drive Genius DVD again thinking I would give it's repair function a go but it wouldn't touch it. No explanation just a big red exclamation mark. Well thanks.

Booting the Leopard DVD and using Disk Utility it declared the disk beyond rescue with something broken in the catalog. Nice.

At this point I formatted the disk and resigned myself to many hours restoring from my SD backup which seemed to go smoothly.

I guess I can't prove that Drive Genius fucked my disk up but that's what I believe. I'm just grateful that I had a backup and it restored. It'll certainly be a long time before I trust Drive Genius with my data again.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on drive-genius

I should have known better