Oh the woes of computer collapse!

I’ve been meaning to write here, but things have conspired against me!

I was in a meeting of the UK Baha’i National Spiritual Assembly (the Baha’i community’s national governing council) all weekend and right in the middle of this my computer decided to go all sulky on me and refused to work.

Needless to say, all my papers for the meeting were on the computer. So, I spent the rest of the weekend flying blind, as it were, through the consultations. Actually, truth to tell, I had studied all the documents before the meeting (and before computer meltdown) and the kind souls who are my neighbours around the NSA table let me look over their papers when I needed to remind myself of something.

Got home last night and spent several hours trying to figure out the problem. I called Alex (my eldest son), who is my private helpline on all things computer, a couple or three times. I tested for hardware faults. I took memory chips out and put them back in. I ran diagnostics. I started the sulky machine in what’s called Target Disk Mode and hooked it up to another computer so that I could access its hard drive.

In the end all I could do was to erase the hard drive (yes, I’d backed up to a bootable external drive on Friday) and start again. Then I couldn’t get it to start from the OS install DVD. That necessitated another conversation with Alex this morning.

In desperation I flicked through my collection of system CDs etc and, yes, I had one of those head-striking, duh-inducing moments. There, staring up at me, was a disk calling itself “MacBook Pro Mac OSX Install Disk 1″. I popped it in the drive, restarted, and … bingo!

So now I’m working on my old PowerBook and watching the reinstall continuing on my MacBook Pro.

I was going to write about something more interesting, but my whole being goes into an existential black hole when my computer doesn’t work. Not that this happens often, but when it does it induces a state of unrest in the core of my being. In Unix terms, I suffer a kernel panic.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, computer, MacBook Pro

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