Tuesday, June 12, 2007
compoooters - ala Mac
macs are by far the easiest form of technology to use - when i had a windows machine, most of my time was spent fixing the myriad of problems with the system - regedit, deleting corrupt DLLs, defragmenting the boot drive, and actually doing an entire format and reinstall every 3 or 4 months or so. macs, by comparison, are much easier to use and maintain. for the past year and a half i've had no problems whatsoever with the system or the OS and its components. i drive it pretty hard (as in 15 programs open at once, itunes going full blast, photoshop doing it's thing, the works) and a program may lock up every now and then, but nothing like a full-on system crashing event.
so when my file system became corrupt, it was both a shock and a huge inconvenience. when everything just works, you start to take it for granted.
it had nothing to do with the OS, but a program, perhaps you know of it: limewire? apparently, these p2p programs are written so hastily that how they interface with the system can be awkward. it may work for a time, but after a while, something's bound to go haywire. and it did.
how mac os organizes itself is like this: with a lot of information, sometimes it's not possible to put files that need each other right next to each other on the physical drive. i'm not talking in the same folder or something, i'm talking right next to each other on the hard drive platter itself. it's possible for sure, but sometimes something is already there and it'd be a pain to move it somewhere else on the drive. so, mac os sets up little things called sibling links, and what they do is point to the location of a necessary file that is somewhere else on the hard drive - this is for the operating system itself, not files that i have created. example: i execute a command (say, open dashboard to check movie times), then the system interprets the command, looks for the code to execute, and does it. but if there's a second part of the code that it needs to execute, but it's not near the first part, the system needs a way to find it quick in order to execute the command in a timely fashion. enter the sibling link. attached to the first string of code is a little pointer that says "part two of the execute code is at (x,y,z) on the hard drive" so the system can find the code quickly. and when it works, it works perfect. when it doesn't...
so what happened was, limewire, in the way it interfaced with the system, somehow interfered with these sibling links and messed them up. so when the system goes looking for the second part of the code to execute a command, it doesn't find it because the sibling link is pointing in the wrong place. what that means is, the system now has to search the entire drive in order to find the file. think of it as finding a needle in a haystack with a magnet the size of a credit card - it gets done, but it takes a hell of a long time. this means that every 30 seconds or so, the system would lock up for about a minute and a half. then i have another 30 seconds. then lock up again. kind of hard to work.
in short, i backed up, erased the drive and wrote over it with zeros (seven times actually), then reinstalled the OS and put my files back over. total time from realization of problem to resolution: about 12-14 hours. i'll be backing up my files every couple weeks after this.
didn't really make my weekend.
Labels: apple, computers, osx, technology
posted by Jack Curry @ 8:26 PM |
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