woes of mac

Yesterday I awoke to a frozen mac. Nothing was responding. I forced a reboot and found that the system was apparently screwed.

I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out what could have caused the problem, was it the 64 gb of swap that I removed from my hard drive last week (8gb ram). With all that ram, osx seems to like putting a bunch of swap there for no apparent reason.

At the end of the day, I figured that the drive was shot. That would be really bad, as for one, a bunch of documents that I was finishing for my AB would have been gone with no backup, as well as a software project due in September (have been working on it since December) would have to be rewritten from scratch.

I broke out in panic when trying to boot hirens or sysrescue. Nothing could find sda, and due (I assume) to macs different device naming, none of my live systems could find /dev/cdrom. This meant that none of the live systems could mount their images on /mnt to continue on to the actual file repair systems.

Finally I found a copy of ubuntu 10.10, It booted. I started Gparted and ran some package updates to get hfs and journaled hfs+ file system support. I assume that hfsprogs is a kernel add-on, which means I would need to reboot or reload the kernel before being able to fix up the file system. On a live system this would mean acutally loosing hfs support since the cd is not writeable to save any changes, and a usb system cant be done due to apples stupidity and not allowing usb boots, something that has been standard since 07 or so.

A wisp of genious came along as I found a 2gb sdcard. I decided to install the /boot partition to the sdcard, as well as grub boot loader and install the rest of the system on a 8gb usb drive ... Its installing now.

--update--

The nice part about this, well at some point in time I installed an ubuntu system on a resizrd partitions free space, I gave it @30 gb, more then enough to install a rescue OSX.

Still I have the porblem of accessing my main hd as it is encrypted.

A cool thing is also, on my iomega ix-200 nas; to get time machine to backup over the network you do have to turn off security completely. Seeing that I am the only one to access my wpa2 enterprize encrypted wireless network (provided by the great dd-wrt people over at Buffalo) I think Im kinda safe, maybe thats the problem; I am too secure in my knowledge, so when it breaks, so do I. :( Also a nice aditive of not having security on is, the ssh connectivity to the drive. You can still controll access via users and shadows, the old linux way, but no shiny new web interface for that.

Oh these words of wisdom while fixing broken things that I could have avoided by trying to be less complicated in my "apparent Knowledge"....Im working on it.