Disaster averted...
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 10:31AM Happily ploughing through my email inbox this morning, trying to get on top of things, when suddenly, the Mac Pro "kernel panicked". To the uninitiated, or to those who still think Macs don't crash, this is the equivalent of the Windows "Blue Screen of Death" on a Mac, albeit handled much more elegantly by a slowly rising curtain of darkness with a multilingual message displayed centre screen.
Anyhow, it means the whole Mac has crashed and you need to power down and power back up.
Since getting a Mac 5 or 6 years ago, this has happened six or seven times on various machines and usually a reboot fixes things.
Except this time...
The Mac Pro would not boot.
Not "pining for the fjords" or simply "stunned", it was a true "Norwegian Blue".
No chimes, just a laboured sound of a fan spinning up and down again in a cycle.
Oh dear!
Baring in mind this was my main production machine, an icy chill ran down my spine when I realised the severity of the problem.
Luckily, this only lasted for a second or two as I had a contingency plan.
Back when the Nehalem Mac Pros came out (you know, the ludicrously expensive ones), my local Apple store contacted me to see if I'd be interested in one of the pre-Nehalem Mac Pros at a knock down price. To cut a long story short, I said yes! The main idea was that I could use two Mac Pros as a distributed encoding system but to be honest, due to the flakyness of Compressor, this never really worked out. The second reason was to have a backup machine, you know, just in case I ever had a problem with my main production machine.
Like today!
So within 5 minutes of the problem, I had both Mac Pros disconnected and next to one another.
A single flick of the lock both side panels were off.
Pulled 4 drives out of each machine and swapped them over - no tools required
Removed the Expansion Card holder in each machine (4 screws)
Moved my CompressHD card and MX02 card from the production machine to the Spare and replaced the gard holder.
Panels back on and reconnect.
Within 15 minutes I had the spare Mac pRo back up and running with the identical configuration as before and I'm back in business.
The "spare" Mac Pro was being used by my wife so in order to keep her working, I took the boot drive from the spare Mac Pro and inserted it into the Voyager Quad Interface and connected it to my old 17" MacBook Pro via Firewire. Chose the external drive as the boot drive and she's working away exactly the same as before.
All that is left is for me to battle through the snow to take this Mac Pro back to the Apple store for repair. Wish that Apple did a home repair service - I'd pay for that.
So my folly of buying a second Mac Pro has now been completely justified and it's a huge relief to know I can carry on regardless.
As an aside, the ease at which you can transport drives between machines and how OSX can boot machines with external drives without the slightest hiccup is one of the most impressive features of using Macs, especially when comparing the nightmare of trying to boot a mixture of Windows machines. It just makes it so easy to support and should be one of the reasons why businesses and corporates should take Macs more seriously.
Don McAllister
The Mac Pro is now safely back from the repair shop. It seems they needed to replace the logic board.
Reader Comments (9)
Eeek that does sound like a huge problem narrowly averted by ingenious thinking and plenty of tech around the the house.
I fully agree with you Don, that if Apple did offer a home repair service (perhaps in silver vans with a white Apple logo on) that would be something I would definitely pay for. Reason being is that like yourself we simply need our computer to work and live, and if something goes wrong we cant wait for a repair to be carried out either in an Apple store or wait for it to be shipped back and forth, we need it fixed and ASAP.
Perhaps this is something Apple could call 'Apple Care +' ?
“A slow curtain of darkness” — I love it.
Seriously now, though, I love how the Mac OS isn’t tied to a specific installation on a specific machine. You can simply clone drives, shuffle the data around and then boot pretty much any installation on pretty much any machine.
It is in wonderful contrast to how I’ve experienced moving a WInodws installation from one machine to another — if the motherboard is different, the installation simply bluescreens and refuses to go anywhere. And that’s before you run into activation issues!
Good luck with the broken Mac Pro. Hope they can fix it in the store and do not need to order a new main... pardon! Logicboard and keep it there for a week or so.
Please keep us updated :) (and that's the moment where I put your blog into my netvibes "blog" tab ;))
Obvious solution - if you'd had a 3rd Mac Pro, Mrs. Don could have kept working with missing a beat :-)
Don -- Like they say, it's not a matter of IF but WHEN. You highlight perfectly the need to not only have backups of data, but also of the computer! Wish I could afford to have a backup Mac Pro.
BTW, in the United States the AppleCare includes onsite repair (for desktops, not laptops). All that's necessary is to request that a technician come to your work site. A lot of people who purchase AppleCare don't realize this. Is it not so in the UK?
Dave
I too love the Mac's ability to boot off of drives that "float around". Based upon your show, I bought a Voyager Quad and now I use it for bootable Super Duper backups, a mountable bulk data drive (not online all the time), and a Windoze XP drive from a dead system. Bought NTFS for MAC OSX and now I have full R/W access to the data on that drive. All different drives swapped in/out of the Voyager.
Thanks for doing SCO and Happy New Year.
Don you should check out the Console Logs to see what caused the panic, since you took out the drives and put them into another machine. The Log might give a clue to why it happened. I hope it can be fixed, cheaply at that.
Apple home repair is much needed. I had to take my iMac to the Apple store once and that was crazy. I would pay for a home visit! Best of luck with the repair, they are only computers after all.
I can't believe I read that whole bloody transcript Don!
Now if you had 4 Mac Pro's you could offer your wife the same level of recovery............I am just saying, you don't (Buy them you know you want to) rush out......