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Filesystem Heck

In Geek on 6/19/2009 by adam

For some time now, we’ve been using an old PowerMac G5 for some general purpose family computing. It’s located centrally in our house. Proximity to and an excellent view of the television is purely coincidental. We can also get a few tasks done while keeping an eye on unnamed bipedal and quadrupedal troublemakers. You know, fun like:

  • paying bills
  • reading email
  • keeping up with all those time-sucking social networks
  • shopping
  • maintaining our photo library
  • maintaining our catalog of books (via Delicious Library)
  • editing video (and rendering slowly)

It was working out pretty well until … well, until it wasn’t. Random crashes. Laggy operation. General computer crabbiness.

I’m not terribly satisfied with the built-in troubleshooting tools in Mac OS X, but at least Disk Utility told me there were some filesystem problems. Fine, fine. I clicked the button that says “Verify.” I got a response back that says, basically, “You should repair this, Charlie. Try clicking the button that says “Repair.”" What would I do without such simple instructions? I clicked “Repair,” waited, then got a response back that says, basically, “Your problem is irreparable. Poor fellow.”

Reboot from CD. Rinse and repeat. Equally unhelpful. Consistent, though.

Luckily, the OS does turn out to have the tools I need, and it took more work to actually search for the right commands than it did to run them for 1) booting into single-user mode (command-s) and 2) a filesystem check with the right options (/sbin/fsck -fy). If this had been a machine without a flashy GUI, I would have thought of that first.

That worked. As an interesting side effect, it spun up the drive something fierce during the check, which is to be expected. What I didn’t expect was for all nine of the G5′s internal fans to spin up simultaneously and stay running even after the check was done. It must get pretty hot inside that chassis. If you could put your head inside a hair dryer, it would have sounded something like that.

Reboot. Problem solved. Disaster averted. Now, onto better backups.

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