Fuck Me

So when I was upgrading my iMac to El Capitan yesterday it totally froze up. It was stuck at “18 minutes remaining” for almost 2 hours. Knowing that something was definitely amiss, I had but few options looking me in the face.

1) I could let the computer sit there indefinitely hoping it would progress (not likely)

2) I could reboot the computer and pray I could start the install all over again.

After some deliberation, I decided to reboot it. Yeah…then the fun began.

The reason the upgrade failed was because somehow the install had corrupted my HD. Not good, right? So I tried to do an Internet Recovery to re-install OS X. No dice. The Internet Recovery program downloaded OS X Mountain Lion (what originally came with the iMac) but then it told me it couldn’t be installed. I would later figure out that this was because the HD was corrupted, but I did not know this at this point. So after that failed attempt, I of course tried again but was met with the same results. This was when I went into Disk Utility and looked at the physical hard disk. The diagnostics could not verify, nor repair the HD. It fact, it came up in big red letters telling me that the repair had failed due to a corrupted drive. Well shit on me.

Not having many other options starring me in the face, I decided to restore from a Time Machine backup. This option was my only hope of getting the computer back up and running but it presented its own problems.

1) The partition on my 1tb external drive that I use for my Time Machine backup was never large enough to backup our photos or music. I never worried about this since I was going to back them up manually on a separate HD.

2) Guess what I never got around to doing?

3) I had to reformat the HD to do the Time Machine restore. This would literally kill all hopes of trying to get my photos and music off of the HD.

Having no other options, I wiped the drive and restored from my Time Machine backup from that morning.

About 6 hours later when it completed, I was met with horror.

I never used the option to backup the Application folder since I would simply re-download anything I needed should I need to restore the computer. Big mistake. As it turns out, if you don’t do that then NONE of your applications are backed up, even the ones that come with OS X. That meant no programs at all were installed on the computer. So what now? I decided that I’ll just pop into the App Store and try upgrading to El Capitan again, which should give me all of my apps back. Well, no Applications equals no App Store. So I remote into my Mac Mini and download a copy of Firefox. I then uploaded it to the USB drive connected to my router and download Firefox from there to my iMac. I install Firefox and was back up and online. I search for a way to download a copy of the App Store. No dice. There was a convoluted way you could do it in terminal with an install DVD (I had a copy of Lion sitting here) but I had no Terminal program to do that in. So I decided to just throw in the Lion DVD and install Lion instead. No dice either since it would not let me install an older version of the operating system since I already had a newer one installed. Now what?

Instead of wiping the computer again, installing Lion, and then doing a Time Machine restore, I decided to try and go back into the Internet Recovery Mode. When I did, it now presented me with an option to download and install a fresh copy of OS X Yosemite since it saw that I now had that installed on my computer. I was lucky enough to have the OS download and install without issue. In a few hours, my computer was back up and running.

While it finished installing Yosemite, I took my family out to dinner at The Dough Company for a nice dinner to celebrate my upcoming birthday. Also it was pretty much the only option since I had been working on this issue since 9:30am and it was 5:00pm with no dinner even started. But before we went to the restaurant, I headed to Best Buy and picked up a new 4tb external drive. This would be my new backup drive. A 2tb partition for hourly backups of my entire internal HD, and a 2tb partition for manual backups. When we got home last night and the kids were in bed I also opened up a Carbonite account and now have all of my photos and music automatically being uploaded to the Cloud.

So what about our photos and music? Well, through various online repositories and an old manual backup from last year, I have successfully managed to restore about 99% of our photos in the past 12 hours. How many photos is that? Try 35,329 photos. Needless to say I will not be going through this again since they are now being automatically backed up locally and in the cloud.

As for the music? So far today I have been able to restore only 2,228 songs. I have another 60gb of songs on my iPod Video, but I need to purchase a program to download those. Considering I just spent $50 last night on a year of Carbonite, I think I’ll hold off until payday to buy the program I need. I also have talked to my mother of whom I have given a good portion of my music collection to over the years. I’ll be taking an external HD over to her house and grabbing a few gigabytes of music there to bring home this weekend. But the most tedious task is still ahead. I have several hundred CDs upstairs packed away that need to be brought down and ripped all over again. Last time I did this it took me about 3 weeks and that was before having kids. Now I estimate it’ll take about twice as long.

But that’s alright. Music can be re-ripped and even purchased online. Memories like the first photos of your kids or precious family memories cannot be purchased. I have rescued those precious memories and for that I am very thankful.