At around 11:00 PM last night, my three week-old MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo laptop had a kernel panic, and afterwards, it wouldn’t reboot. I tried to use Disk Utility (from the installation DVD) to repair the hard disk, but it errored out (saying that the hard disk couldn’t be unmounted); the same error occurred when I put the machine into target disk mode and mounted it on my old 12” Powerbook. I was able to boot the MacBook Pro into single-user mode and try to use fsck to diagnose the disk, but it too threw an error (0xe0030005 UNDEFINED, Invalid node structure) and refused to complete. Thinking about third-party hard disk diagnosis and repair tools, I quickly learned that DiskWarrior doesn’t run on the Intel Macs yet, and TechTool doesn’t run on the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duos yet (not that I have it, being that AppleCare takes three to four weeks to process applications and provide the software to users). At around 3 AM, I realized that I could get at around 80-90% of my files using single-user mode, mount a USB hard disk, and use rsync to copy the still-accessible files over to the drive, a process that took enough patience and debugging that it didn’t complete until around 5 PM today.

Needless to say, I’m frustrated, a frustration that’s amplified tenfold by the fact that I’m traveling this Friday evening, and really really wanted to have my laptop with me for the five-day trip. I’m fortunate to work for a huge federal agency that has an on-site support and repair contract with Apple, but it’s unclear that they’re going to be able to get me back up and running by the time I leave town.

Sometimes, technology sucks.