How I spent the 4th.

[Whitehill]

When I tried to do anything Wed. morning, the beach-ball started spinning. So I patiently quit all applications and tried to restart.

Oops - the gray screen of death. Power off, power on - same thing. Power off, power on with option key: it presented me with my system disk, my TechTools eDrive, and my SuperDuper external drive.

Choosing the latter, I arrived at the gray screen again. Hmmm. Evidently whatever was wrong got copied to that drive in the previous daily update.

Choosing the eDrive, it booted and I started running diagnostics. It didn't reveal anything interesting and got stuck somewhere in the system checks.

At that point I had a cookout to attend. Thursday morning, today, I tried reinstalling from my Lion install DVD - yes, I had made one - and in two attempts it stalled after loading the Italian package. Arrivederci.

The one remaining option was to restore from my TM disk. It worked! It booted! So far, the worst that has happened is Mail demanded to import everything. And Safari has lost the handful of extensions I had installed.

OK, gurus. What should I do now? And what should I do soon to avoid this in the future?

[Satcomer]

Have a viable backup at all times! All hard drives WILL fail and the failure rate is arbitrary. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but is my many years of computing have backed up my feeling.

[djackmac]

Have a viable backup at all times! All hard drives WILL fail and the failure rate is arbitrary. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but is my many years of computing have backed up my feeling.

Considering the age of the machine (if the machine in the sig and original drive?), I'd say more problems are on the horizon. Start shopping drive prices and make sure backups are up to date and good.

[Whitehill]

Have a viable backup at all times! All hard drives WILL fail and the failure rate is arbitrary. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but is my many years of computing have backed up my feeling.

That's what I thought I had with SuperDuper. How does one determine viability? Should I try to start up from it every day / week / month?

Yes, the machine in question is 4 years old.

[Satcomer]

Well TechTools should alert you when running.

The more I think about it is might be bad running program messing with you Lion system files. Keep an eye on the Console logs to see if you see many errors on something.

You are doing the right thing with a clone & Time Machine. My feeling you should clone once every 3 days and let Time Machine run at it's normal interval. This way you have a backup and also have a good files backup (with Time Machine).

Also check and make sure all you RAM is running without errors. Plus to be sure run in Single-User Mode and run fsck -fy on your startup drive, to be sure.

[DeltaMac]

Your backups are to protect your files.
I also think that your backup combination should be a good one.
One thing that a backup does NOT do, is extend the working life of your existing hard drive.
If you continue to have problems that MIGHT be associated with a questionable hard drive, then you continue to back up (the full clones every 3 days seems like very often, but may be a good plan when you begin to experience the early signs of HD death.
And, so you consider replacements - 3 or 4 years of HD life seems to be a fairly normal replacement interval. Should you expect longer life from a HD? Sure, but there's a short side to that, too, for what many long-time users expect, especially for those that are used in a commercial environment.

[Satcomer]

One more thing. Use /Applications/Utilities/System Information (or just hold down the 'option' key while clicking on the top left Apple symbol) and in the application highlight memory and see if any of your RAM sticks is throwing up errors.

[Whitehill]

The more I think about it is might be bad running program messing with you Lion system files. Keep an eye on the Console logs to see if you see many errors on something.

The system does seem to be a bit more responsive after this ordeal. On the console I am seeing quite a few of these:

7/7/12 10:14:28.183 AM mdworker: (Error) ImportPluginLoading: Couldn't load plugin 'file://localhost/Library/Spotlight/iWeb.mdimporter/'

Nothing else sticks out.

One more thing. Use /Applications/Utilities/System Information (or just hold down the 'option' key while clicking on the top left Apple symbol) and in the application highlight memory and see if any of your RAM sticks is throwing up errors.

No issues shown there. And I ran TechTool's RAM test a few times - all passed. And its Surface Scan test located about a dozen bad blocks on the 1T device, none associated with files. The OS seems to be managing them OK.

As for replacing the disk ... After looking up instructions on the internet, I don't believe I want to get personally involved. The closest licensed tech gave me an informal estimate of $400, parts and labor, to swap in a 2T drive. Is that reasonable?

Of course I have no hard evidence of disk problems.