Why I've Not Posted In A While...

Some of you may have noticed I haven't posted in a while... and wondered quietly to yourself "Why?"

(Ok, maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway...)

And that is for the plain reason that I royally messed up my computer and nearly lost everything on it!

Here's the story:

As I mentioned earlier after I came back from my relatively recent trip to California I had to use Disk Utility on my MacMini's Hard Disk, due to it getting corrupted somehow.

When I used Disk Utility to repair my HD, it created a folder at the root level of my startup disk called "lost+found" (or something like that)... which I didn't notice until about a couple weeks ago.

From that folder I was able to get back a little of the music I lost the first time (see this post for more).

In that folder were a bunch of other folders with with a bunch of numbers for their names and in the folders were a bunch of resources with a bunch of numbers in their names... which I had no idea where they were from.

Well, after pulling the music I found from the folders I proceeded to delete the /lost+found folder.

When emptying the trash, in order to delete the folder it asked me to enter my password... Which should probably have been a sign that something in there shouldn't be deleted.

But not thinking, I went ahead and entered my password and deleted the folder anyway.

Then the next time I shutdown my computer (which I hardly ever do) and tried to start it again I was greeted with a black screen that said:

disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
Mar 13 12:16:10 Launchd: can't exec /bin/sh for single users Input/Output error

And it would keep showing that error line after line over and over again.

So apparently I messed with something that shouldn't have been messed with.

I tried whatever I could to try to fix it, but that day we didn't have Internet access... so I couldn't look anything up online!

The first thing I did was to copy all my important files and documents over to an external hard disk. Which I had to do booting from my OSX Install Disk and using terminal.

I started copying everything over one file and folder at a time using the commands $ cp /file/to/copy /place/to/copy/to and $ mkdir /location/to/create/directory...

Remember I didn't have Internet access so I didn't have internet access and was not all that brushed up on *nix commands to know about the recursive copy command flag ($ cp -R /entire/folder/to/copy /location/to/copy/to) until I asked my dad if there was an easier way to copy files through the terminal.

After doing that I figured that maybe if I just upgraded from tiger to leopard I might be able to save just about everything. But after I tried to do that I the computer wouldn't recognize the disk as a mountable volume.

Knowing that I'd have to erase that disk anyway to get it back, I just decided to install the new bigger hard disk I had just bought after I got back from California.

I chose to install the new hard disk on the same day when Time Warner Cable was checking out our cable internet connections in our house.

So I popped open my MacMini and installed the new hard disk I had... a huge 250 GB disk to replace the 100 GB disk I originally got with it.

I needed this new disk so that I could install both Leopard and Tiger on two separate partitions, with all my music and other stuff on the 100 GB disk I couldn't do it with sufficient space for each boot partition.

And it wasn't until just the end of last week that I was able to install everything back on Tiger for production once again!