# Ever have a bad computer karma day? What's the worst that has happened to you?



## Giaguara (Mar 2, 2008)

*You know one of those bad energy days when everything goes horribly wrong...* when you hit your head or toes getting out of the bed, burn yourself with the coffee, break your car and miss the bus and have your computer fail, and when you get back home your Mac fails too...? _Those _days.

When you should clearly switch off all electronic equipment and go fishing or do something as non-computer related as possible.

*What's the worst computer karma day(s) or weeks you've had so far?*

I think I'm having one of the worst weeks ever now.

Last Sunday, I installed 10.4.10 on top of 10.4.10, hoping it would resolve a number of underlying issues (before being able to clean the data from the hard drive to an external hard drive, and then do an erase and install). After the install was nearly ready, it asked for a reboot... and it's not been working since. It could not boot, and I could not install even 10.5 on it. Fair enough, I found it has a piece of RAM gone suddenly bad, but it's stuck in it (blame the ones who repaired it..) and can't be solved without force (I don't really fancy breaking the logic board of it). So that's out of the usable ones now. Can't get that piece of RAM out, can't boot it, doesn't have a system as erasing went fine but 10.5 fails to collaborate in installation.
All that gone bad after that 10.4.10 update.

Okay, fast forward to Saturday. I was then using my dad's Mac mini, not the newest and not the fastest, but it was my dad's and I bought it one day for him so he could get to the internet and skype for me for cheaper than calling. Now that he's dead, it's one of the Macs that actually has some more sentimental value to it, so I don't mind using it, and hey, it was working. My dad didn't do all the incremental updates for it, so it had 10.4.2, and as it was working fine, why bother... except two softwares that I needed to use now would require a newer version of OS X and Java so after doing all the precautions of quitting all unnecessary apps and fixing permissions, I installed the 10.4.11 combo update on it. It installed fine, and asked to reboot after it as usual, only that after the reboot it was black, loud, did something for a few minutes, rebooted, was loud... after a number of restart attempts and resets (pmu) there is not a sign of life left - no startup chime, no sound from the thing when switching it on, no lights in front. 
So after this 10.4.11 update.. I'm without a working Mac 

After this I'm afraid to even touch the work Dell. 

But there is nothing else I can use home now... (and at least if something goes horribly wrong with it, I can always ask the IT people from work to fix it. So I don't have to deal with the worst service provider of the planet for it).

And not on the best mood...

In the fairness, after repairing a not so small number of Macs, and doing installs and updates on hundreds of them, I've seen very few instances where the update goes this horribly bad. And they've all been on not my own ones (excluding 10.2 update install on 10.1.5.. no Finder) so not that much of personal attachment to it. 
And never before have I seen two consecutive updates I've done anywhere gone this wrong...

---- edit: after no signs of life after PMUs, it should have been either a fried MLB or adapter. I tried with a housemate's Mac mini adapter downstairs, and it got the chime. And then with his adapter upstairs on my location and it got the chime again. And then with my adapter again, and it got the chime again. 
This does not make any sense.. PMU reset was properly done, I had retried with the adapter last night, I had tried with different power outlets too. I don't get it... using it with his adapter nevertheless got it to boot up again, and it works again with mine. One less thing to worry. Pheoow.


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## Rhisiart (Mar 2, 2008)

Reading your post


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## chevy (Mar 2, 2008)

As everybody.... I once in my life regretted not to have a discipline doing my back-ups !


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## fryke (Mar 2, 2008)

Same here. Those backups before TimeMachine. MacBook (white). I installed a harddrive, put all my files on it and worked off it for a couple of weeks without backing up. Suddenly the drive went dead. I've got 7 years of E-Mail correspondence, minus two months. I somehow was proud of having that archive. Now I'm thinking: It's not complete. Should I get rid of it and live on gmail.com starting now? Well: I'm currently backed up and have three Macs. I sure hope they won't die _all_ on me in the same timeframe. (I actually hope none dies, of course.)


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## Giaguara (Mar 2, 2008)

Well... I guess should add mr Giaguara's one day with a 17" PowerBook in this bad karma day. He was chatting with me, and spilled a 14 oz mug of green tea on it, all over the keyboard. Piffff.... what everyone else that I know would have done would have been a huge panic or a heartattack etc after unplugging the power cord. Well - unplug the power cord, take it apart, dry it... two hours later online, on that same PowerBook. I'm still blown away.
(Having no sugar in the tea helped for sure). I guess the tea/coffee/wine/anything liquid on a laptop isn't something that anyone wants to experience on theirs...


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## Rhisiart (Mar 2, 2008)

As an IT virgin in 1998, I write a 3,000 thousand word thesis on a PC and failed to back it up. The rest is history ....


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## Satcomer (Mar 3, 2008)

Giaguara did you ever fix any of these problems?


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## Giaguara (Mar 4, 2008)

Those on mine? Yea... different power supply resurrected the Mac mini.
And the MacBook... need to still get a new RAM for it. 
I've seen all sorts of interesting things on other people's Macs, from RAM gone "missing" to something having dropped to PowerBook keyboard (physically breaking several keys while happened), all sorts of parts fixed wrong (no sound when the sound cables are forgotten under the logic board, gee why..) or iPods gone thru the washing machine - I just prefer when those things don't happen on my own Macs


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## Hughvane (Apr 19, 2008)

My computer caught fire! It was a Performa 6200, a faulty psu overheated and shorted, some wiring started smoldering. When I returned with my mug of coffee I was tempted to use the contents as a fire extinguisher. However I unplugged the machine, pulled all connecting cables and lowered the offender out the window. The fire, such as it was, petered out. I recovered the hard drive from that machine but most other components were history.


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## nixgeek (Apr 20, 2008)

Well, it looks as though I'd have to say the incidents with my iMac G5.  I've had the logic board and power supply replaced in January as some of you already know.  Guess what?  Now it won't start up anymore.  I open it up and what do I see?  Two bulging capacitors and the LED lights on the inside only show one lit up.  So it looks like it's back to the Apple Store to have my iMac G5 innards replaced once again.  I'm going to have to start saving up for an older Power Macintosh G4 (maybe a MDD model) until the Intel Macs come down in price.  Yes, I've thought about the Mac mini but I need something a little more beefier than that for my music compositions.

*Sigh*


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## Hughvane (Apr 20, 2008)

nixgeek said:


> ...start saving up for an older Power Macintosh G4 (maybe a MDD model) until the Intel Macs come down in price.  Yes, I've thought about the Mac mini but I need something a little more beefier than that for my music compositions. *Sigh*



What about a G5 tower machine? The dual-processor 1.8 GHz sells 2-hand here for US$950. One of these is on my long-term shopping list, they come down steadily in price as people move to the 'must have' models.


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## nixgeek (Apr 20, 2008)

Hughvane said:


> What about a G5 tower machine? The dual-processor 1.8 GHz sells 2-hand here for US$950. One of these is on my long-term shopping list, they come down steadily in price as people move to the 'must have' models.



If I'm going to spend that much money, I might as well go a little further and get an Intel Mac.  As it stands, even some of the Power Macintosh G5 systems are having reliability problems.  Check MacinTouch and you'll see what I mean.  It's a shame that such a nice processor was scarred by such crappy design all for the sake of form. 

If the PowerPC 970 really needed the cooling, Jobs should have conceded from the get go or just stuck with the G4 until it was time for the big switch.

Besides, my father bought a nice dual 867 MHz Power Macintosh G4 for only $299 from Mac of All Trades.  It only cost him more (about $75 bucks more) because he had to pay sales tax since both my father and MoAT are in Florida and he wanted it shipped ASAP.  They also had a 1 GHz MDD (single CPU) for less than that ($249).


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## Hughvane (Apr 20, 2008)

nixgeek said:


> some of the Power Macintosh G5 systems are having reliability problems.  Check MacinTouch and you'll see what I mean.



Thanks for the info, one of the best features of these forums. I take it you mean this: http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/pmg5.html

I'll be looking - and waiting - for the PPC 970MP model.



> Besides, my father bought a nice dual 867 MHz Power Macintosh G4 for only $299



That's a very friendly price. The equivalent here is about US$80 dearer. It's all about numbers. We don't have the turnover in Mac computers in NZ. You'd be amazed at how we Kiwis hang on to supposedly obsolete hardware (of all descriptions).

I'd stick with my old G3 b/w dual-drive Yosemite if it were faster, it does its work wonderfully well - but slowly. Comparing it with modern hardware is a bit like comparing a Case tractor with a Ferrari. In other words you don't plough a field with a Ferrari!


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## reed (Apr 27, 2008)

That bleaking Icon in the middle of the screen? All is dead as a doornail. Somebody "screwed-up." Need I say more?  Start all over again....and good luck to re-install the lot!!!!!

SIGH.


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## vivunger (May 15, 2008)

Recent disaster in not backing up when my PowerBook died unexpectedly... as a Grad student I almost lost all my work.. thanks to the Apple store I (my data) was saved... AMEN! Taught me a good lesson!


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## rubaiyat (May 19, 2008)

My worst disaster was when I upgraded to OSX and experienced a disappearing directory, unfortunately containing all my tax and accounts which I was in the process of updating but hadn't quite completed and backed up. 

The worst part was I didn't notice for a while and found it extremely difficult to find my place and reconstruct all my efforts.

Recently I upgraded my iMac G5 to Leopard after cloning my Tiger system onto an external FW drive. After the Leopard upgrade it will no longer see *any* FireWire devices, so I can't get at my precautionary backup. 

This and other associated problems have been consuming my time for over 2 weeks now.


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