Arrg. My upgrade to Leopard didn’t go well last night.
I commented back in January about my Mac issues, and they reared their ugly head again. I’ve continued to have problems restarting my Mac, half of the time it can’t find the hard drive and I get the Question Mark folder. I know I’m in the clear when the Apple logo appears, but that appears less and less these days.
The upgrade to Leopard started fine. When the Mac rebooted, it had no problems locating the startup drive, and allowed me to select it to install the upgrade on. After the brutally long process of verifying the DVD, the upgrade started. Within a few seconds, though, the Mac flashed a large yellow yield sign telling me to contact Apple.
I decided to retry the upgrade. On restart, my drive was no longer selectable. It was an invalid upgrade drive; the installer informed me I’d have to wipe out the drive and start over with a fresh install. Something was hosed (fortunately for me, I performed a full backup prior to all this), so I restarted again. This time, Mac couldn’t find any hard drives to upgrade or install fresh. Nothing. Nada. Subsequent reboots didn’t fix this.
Frustrated, I ejected the Leopard update DVD and attempted a restart again. Lucky me, there is the Apple logo! However, that was short lived, since a few moments after the logo appeared, Mac shut itself down. Subsequent restarts displayed the same behavior. Mac is totally hosed.
Tomorrow will be my first exposure to Apple’s so-called ‘Genius Bar.’ Updates to follow…
Sad Michael.
Update 05/21/08: Genius Bar is pretty cool, they seem to have knowledgeable people working at it. Within a few seconds of relaying my story, they agreed the 500GB drive is/was going kaput, and will replace it. It’ll take 4-6 days, so I’m going through a bit of World of Warcraft withdrawal. Not that I play it much, but I’m kind of in the mood.
on Jun 10th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
So, after the HD replacement, things are behaving better, in the sense of the ‘flashing ?’
-Ty
on Jun 10th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Since the good folks at Genius Bar replaced the hard drive, I’ve had no further issues — Mac restarts great, and I don’t see the pinwheel anymore. At this point, it certainly does appear to have been a hard drive issue all along.
My hat goes off to Apple’s Genius Bar, they did a great job!
on Aug 22nd, 2008 at 8:12 pm
[...] has been running great since I had the hard drive replaced a few months ago. No more lengthy pinwheel spinning and not a single flashing question mark folder [...]