You’re using OS X, right?

Get Cocktail. Go to the “Pilot,” check “run cron scripts” and “repair permissions,” then have it do its thing. Restart.

When you restart, hold down command-s. Whoa! Where’d all that black UNIX text come from? So that’s what OS X looks like with its clothes off… Wait a few moments until the command line prompt shows up. Then type “fsck -y” No, not “fcuk u,” that’s a stupid designer t-shirt. “fsck” stands for File System ChecK, and “-y” means “automatically answer ‘yes’ to any questions I may have for you while I’m checking your disk, such as ‘Dude, your file node count thing is totally bogus, should I, like, fix it for you?”

If the first fsck finds any problems, keep doing it until it tells you “The volume “Adam’s House of Porn” [or whatever you’ve named your HD] appears to be OK.” Then type “reboot” — which gives a chance for OS X to go put on her face again.

The Cocktail thing you should do once a month or so, the fsck only when you’re having problems.

That was fucked-up.

Let me try again.

Adam,

You’re using OS X, right?

Get Cocktail. Go to the “Pilot,” check “run cron scripts” and “repair permissions,” then have it do its thing. Restart.

When you restart, hold down command-s. Whoa! Where’d all that black UNIX text come from? So that’s what OS X looks like with its clothes off… Wait a few moments until the command line prompt shows up. Then type “fsck -y” No, not “fcuk u,” that’s a stupid designer t-shirt. “fsck” stands for File System ChecK, and “-y” means “automatically answer ‘yes’ to any questions I may have for you while I’m checking your disk, such as ‘Dude, your file node count thing is totally bogus, should I, like, fix it for you?”

If the first fsck finds any problems, keep doing it until it tells you “The volume “Adam’s House of Porn” [or whatever you’ve named your HD] appears to be OK.” Then type “reboot” — which gives a chance for OS X to go put on her face again.

The Cocktail thing you should do once a month or so, the fsck only when you’re having problems.

You’d have experienced problems like this long ago and know how to address them.

Good luck and take notes. If it ever happens to me, I’m coming to you for the solution.

Screws ya every time.

as for the infallible part: with a pc, this kind of problem would be total disaster. with my mac (os 9.2), it’s a minor glitch that i fix in minutes — and it happens once or twice a year.

Booting into single-user mode (by holding down command-S) and running fsck isn’t quite like rebuilding the desktop (which is no longer necessary, or even possible, in OS X). It’s more like running Disk First Aid. In fact, it’s *exactly* like running Disk First Aid, except that once OS X has fully booted, Disk First Aid can’t repair the startup volume. So by booting into single-user mode, you can intercept the system before it gets going and safely verify/repair the startup disk. It’s also a cool look at what’s going on “under the hood” in OS X.

As for power usage in sleep mode, on modern machines it’s totally negligible, not much more than the trickle you’d be using if you shut the computer down but left it plugged in. (There’s that hypnotically pulsating power light, but that’s doesn’t require much juice… ) Anyway, there’s definitely no need to ever shut down a Mac running OS X (unless you’re unplugging and moving it), just put it to sleep instead.

I *have* noticed that there’s a difference between the scheduled “Energy Saver” sleep and actually choosing “Sleep” from the Apple menu — the latter turns the fan off and puts you in power-saving “Deep Sleep.” The former is more like a light nap — the fan stays on, etc.

As for the platform wars, all I’m gonna say is that one of the nice things about OS X is that if you’re having disk problems, you usually don’t need expensive commercial software like Norton or whatnot to fix it. Cocktail is freeware, fsck is built-in to the UNIX subsystem — and the two of them are capable of solving virtually all of your commonly-encountered problems.