Time Machine to the rescue!

In early December MMISoftware upgraded a MacBook (MacBook at Amazon), belonging to one of our clients, to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Amazon Link). This week, their machine had a major meltdown and needed a re-install of the operating system.

So, what happened to the machine? Well, I have now idea. The client said they had been using iPhoto when the machine locked up and they forced a re-start. When the machine re-booted it would get as far as the Dock launching, the Dock would then hang and crash, and the machine would not complete the boot.

I tried the usual things. I booted from a Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Amazon Link) install disk, ran disk verification and repaired permissions. No joy. I then tried removing the Dock preferences. Again, the machine would not boot. Finally I concluded that the only solution would be to re-install the system.

When I set the client up with the upgraded MacBook (MacBook at Amazon) I also set up Time Machine and instructed them on how to use it. Luckily, they had been using it! But had not done so in the last day before the crash.

The re-install went great, no problems, and when it got to the point of asking if I wanted to ‘import’ system settings and files from another Mac or a Time Machine backup I used the backup. It worked like a charm! I just left it run, and the machine was back…. and as far as we can tell only one day of work was lost (well, a day and a half if you include the time for the ‘re-install’).

Update: One ‘weird’ side-effect of the ‘re-install’ and reset from the Time Machine backup was the next Time Machine back up took forever and some 60 GB of data was copied over. Odd.