This kind of garbage is exactly why I don’t have a Macbook anymore. Mine was going in for service every, nearly, two months. I kept telling myself that it could happen with any manufacturer, but the fact is, it’s only ever happened with my Macs.

OSX is great. Mac hardware is anything but.

James, this is exactly why everything stored on a laptop should be 3rd tier redundant data. you should have a centralized file-server which is then backed up to external HDD’s. if you did, then right now you could restore the corrupted file-server with the external HDD’s.

i’m surprised you actually backup the system image (with embedded data!) to en external HDD, thats quite amateur-ish. data should always be double backedup OUTSIDE of a system image (if data is embedded inside the system image then it should be 3rd tier).

Have you considered taking your laptop and the external drive back to the Apple store and saying, “Look what your computer did.”

There’s a possibility that they might accept there’s a problem and pay for the data recovery. In particular, I’m absolutely shocked at the numb-nuts approach of formatting and re-installing Leopard.

A dodgy boot partition can be fixed with about 3 words to the Recovery Console command prompt in Windows, I’d assume they have some sort of Mac OS equivalent?

Sounds like you had a rotten bit of bad luck.

Yikes. I am going to open a .Mac account and backup important data offsite.

My bad, I meant James.

Kevin I had the same problem with my Dual 1.8 GHz G5, and it almost looked like a RAM problem, but it was an UPGRADE problem. After I upgraded my G5 to Leopard over 2 months it proceeded to corrupt my external hard drive. It wasn’t until I kept getting the good ole gray power symbol screen in 15 different languages, that I noticed that my external hard drive would not mount. When I hooked it up to my MacBook Pro 17″ it showed that it was there but the directories were damaged. NOTHING could resurrect this drive and remount it. After I realized that archive and re-install failed (took it 48 hours to give me the gray power screen in 15 lang …..)That I finally wiped it and reloaded it from scratch. The G5 has been fine ever since then, but I had to reformat my external Firewire drive. BOTH are working fine now. My theory is that the buggy upgrade of Leopard somehow ended up corrupting my drive. Add to it the “supposed” RAM problems and it makes sense that my G5 was probably corrupting it until it crashed. The strange part is that this is 1 of 5 drives on the Mac (2 internal, 3 chained to a FireWire via a hub). I just chalk it up to an Apple quirk, one of many i have dealt with, with no resolution over the 13 years I have used them.

i think bill is being ironic or sarcastic…

Man, the guy has a problem and the religious wars start up again. Take it somewhere else people, the guy just wants to get his system running. Sheesh…

Just a minor inconvience, just keep in mind that the system is “cool”, “hip” and is packed in very clever packaging.Just a minor inconvenience, just keep in mind that the system is “cool”, “hip” and is packed in very clever packaging. The total loss of all your data and your 4th or so visit to the genius bar with the same machine is nothing compared to that HD thrashing issue you had with vista, or that sleep issue that was a huge deal breaker by any standard.
Apple stuff is fresh, cool, and even if it trashes all your data they still blow away anything out there. Too many people focus on reliability and function- this is a misconception, a PC is a fashion statement first, a useful tool second.
Keep us informed how things go, I’m sure it will be fine, and even if it does not it’s not a big deal, since it’s a Mac!

Taxman, my problem is that OS X will not mount the drive so that I can access it. I’d have to connect it to another system to try to recover things myself but I haven’t had time to look at it.

James, you should still be able to access the files on your Time Machine backup without having to do an actual restore. Your data is by no means lost. I’d recommend that you get your system running stable and then copy over your critical files manually from the back up if it is a software / OS problem.

JK, please don’t loose your faith in tech!! What I would do is to plug the drive into a Linux portable distro like Knoppix for instance and see what the drive looks like, then try recovery software yourself or consult data recovery center, depending how valuable/recoverable from different sources data you stored there.

I agree that it seems to be rather a problem with the logical layer of the partition and the data should be intact for 99,9%.

Gee, I hope my redundant backup: portable HDD + remote rsync to server at home would help me out in this kind of situation…

Good luck and keep us posted!!

Yikes! Sounds like a complete nightmare

Though it just goes to show that relying on just 1 backup is a recipe for disaster.

In any case, good luck.

JK all is not lost! The only plus point in this scenario is the journalling file system, that and it’s stored on a magnetic disk.

I had a similar problem where I had to reformat a Mac HD (ended up formatting it three times), this time caused by disk errors. First I removed the HD from the Mac, put in in a Dell compute and ran a HD repair utility (quite an incredible one, especially when it only costs $60).

I then put the HD in a USB PATA device and attached it to a working Windows computer. As the HD was formatted in an unintelligible system to Windows, I had to use a utility to allow Windows to read it called MacDrive. Once that was in the drive was in My Computer, so I could run WinUnDelete and low and behold: out of the 3094 photos I wanted from the HD, all but three were recovered perfectly.

Feel free to drop me an email if you want to know any more, and good luck!

Next time you come across a fan boy who spouts Apples just work… Ask them this… If Apples just work, why is there a need for the Genius Bar and why is it always packed?!?

Hi JK,

first of all best of luck, I hope it will work out in the end. In the worst case I would try to get help from some hardcore professional data recovery people. They once saved my moms buisiness data by mounting the platters of her half ‘burned’ HD into another casing….