Yesterday, my MBP just froze on my journey to work. I waited five minutes then powered it off. On reboot, it just sat on the boot screen with an Apple logo and the spinner going. Further reboots just took me to the same place.
You can see multiple people talk about similar things in discussion forums.
That was my corporate MacBookPro and my personal one was fine (but sulking from non-use) and it was able to see the failed Mac's hard drive in target mode. Only after thinking about mounting it for 2 mins, and issuing a warning (which I cannot recall the wording to), did it mount in read-only mode.
My colleague Alex Chaffee arrived in work an hour later and reported the same problem encountered on the same stretch of freeway. He could see his drive in target-mode his too.
Mine the phammant.sparsebundle 'folder' had moved out of /Users/phammant/ and gone to the /Users/ directory. I could copy the whole sparsebundle thing off the dead mac and onto the good one over firewire. Mounting it was easy :
hdiutil attach /path/to/sparesebundle
This morning my personal MBP froze on the journey to work (but rebooted fine). It froze last night too. It does not have the sparsebundle stuff activated and is a completely different install of Leopard. I have had that keyboard-driver death thing for a while, and applied the firmware upgrade - but it still happens. Y'all know to press and hold a key for 30 seconds to reboot the driver for the dead keyboard right?
While typing this posting, the MBP hang a second time this morning (but reboots). The first thing to try (after waiting for a few minutes for it to recover) is Command, Control & the Power key. That makes it attempt a soft reboot, whereas the power key on its own, triggers a potentially hard-drive harming sudden power-off.
This morning my corporate MBP has been re-imaged. It passed all memory/drive/drive controller tests overnight. I've yet to reinstall important stuff though. Alex's has been re-imaged, but the saved .sparsebundle dir is not remounting in situ. He's going to have to mount it the same way I have and copy over stuff manually.
Thanks a bunch Apple! You recently tossed your stability out of the window it seems.
