randomduck

I returned home from the Nats game tonight and sat down at my Mac mini to check email and enter some mileage data at BikeJournal.

It froze.

I forced it to shutdown, waited a few seconds, then restarted. The Mac chimed, the screen turned on…

….and there was the blinking-question-mark folder.

Wha?

I tried restarting again – same result.

#@$^@&!

So I boot from the system DVD and run Disk Utility on the HD. It finds numerous missing threads, incorrect file counts, and even a missing (or corrupted) master directory block.

Not good.

Disk Utility tries its best to repair the disk. It succeeds with the MDB, but with little else. So, swallowing my pride, I reformatted the drive and am reinstalling the OS.

A lot of things are on an external drive – most notably my iTunes library.

What did I lose? Email, and iPhoto stuff, most of which is backed up on other computers. And I lost my master mileage chart for 2006.

Ugh.

Fortunately, I have the total miles for each week written down, and have the major rides entered on this blog. But it’s a nuisance. I’m gonna take the Mac to the Apple Store this weekend to see what can be done to remedy the situation.