Natalie Downe

I am lost without my beautiful black macbook. After it ‘bOrk3d’ itself late on New Years Day (I understand tis the season) I have been stuck with my old windows machine. I don’t have any of my programs or saved passwords, I cant type on this keyboard, I miss quicksilver and the system-wide spell checker more than anything. Worse than this though, I keep getting muddled between work and home and those darned command keys and whenever it gets too hot this machine shuts down … grr!

There I was, innocently minding my own business, uploading some photos from my SD card, doing nothing unusual (yes, I know everyone says that, but really!) when it stalled. I restarted and after some time I got the familier blue screen but without the friendly apple logo, in its place was this:

Not a lot of help! Now I know Apple’s have to be international, but by catering to every language with a universal sign and no error message it becomes impossible to google for an answer! what do you search for? “circle with a line through” “stop sign” “universal no sign” “prohibitory sign” and that is just in English! A short phrase, or a number, or anything would help lead to an article on the problem, people could translate it at will and may well have saved me the 30 minutes I was on hold to Apple care in the states.

Before calling I inserted my apple installer disk and tried to run disk utilities on it. Only having 2.6GB left probably didn’t help matters. I tried Fix / verify disk permissions but I got the error:

First Aid failed

Disk Utility stopped verifying permissions on "Macintosh HD"
because the following error was encountered:

The underlying task reported failure on exit.

Gee, thanks Apple that was insightful.

Error message design and copy is so important. Something has gone wrong, the user panics and blames themselves, its a very natural and common emotion. Having error message ‘icons only’ is not at all comforting. The fact that the user has to go that extra step to figure out what is wrong can only serve to make them frustrated at themselves (and the product) and feeling stupid, not a good thing. Hiding technical details but still using technical speak with an error message like “The underlying task reported failure on exit” is so totally pointless that it made me quite angry.

Despite that, Apple care (0870 8760753) were indeed very nice and helpful (even if they do play Christmas holding music well into January!) they took me through the weird apple magic baked into the firmware. None of which worked. I tried using ‘repair disc’ in the disk utilities, the error “Invalid node structure, rebuilding Catalog b-tree” was slightly more informative but no more helpful.

A friend pointed me to the hard-to-find article on apple support. When none of that worked I realised it was pretty much beyond me. I could have tried to re-install, but the Apple chappie said it was most likely a hardware issue and I should take it in. The “folder with a question mark in” confirmed matters.

There are only 3 places in Brighton / Hove I found where you could actually get a macbook repaired. Cancom have a branch on the road leading up to the station but their repair shop is in Gloucester, there are only weekly deliveries so the estimated TWM (Time Without Macbook) was 2-3 weeks. Going to NZ soon so this was pretty tight.

Solutions seamed ok with TWM of under a fortnight, but despite having a branch in Brighton you have to physically go to deepest darkest Hove to take it in, and the people in their call center didn’t appeal to me that much, quite brusk and dismissive. Robert Harding on the other hand is not far into Hove, was very friendly and knowledgeable on the phone and said he would do his best to recover the data, replace the hard drive and have it ready in a week. So that is where I went, I should have it back soon (touchwood).

All in all it was jolly lucky I did a full backup three months ago and use flickr regularly. As for things I create, they are all in remote subversion repositories. The only lost items were a couple movies, which although a shame is not life or livelyhood threatening. I can’t wait till I have my laptop back though.

So I hope you can learn from my close shave, back everything up frequently and use remote repositories … oh and pay attention to error message design!