Repair Stories

Here are some stories about problems with Macs, and how they were resolved. See the Trouble Shooting page for advice on problem solving.

Hard Drive Crash

Hard drives are designed to last a few years. You may be lucky and get a good one that lasts a long time, but don't count on it. This is one reason you should back up your data.

On 10/19/08, I went to boot up my MacBook, and it wouldn't boot. The hard drive was dead. I took the computer in to the Apple Store, and they said, yup, your hard drive is dead. Luckily I had

... so the Apple folks replaced the hard drive at no cost, and when I got the computer home and reinstalled Mac OS X from the install disc, the OS offered to restore from  Time Machine, and not a single file was lost.

Post Reload Tasks

I still had a lot of work to do to get back to full function, because some OS settings are not restored by reloading from Time Machine.

Blank Screen On Wakeup

Part One

I put my (late 2008) MacBook Pro to sleep every night. To wake it up, I hit the shift key and all my applications are up and running.

One morning I tried to wake the computer, and the screen stayed black. No amount of poking the computer, mouse or trackpad actions, etc would make it show anything. Ack!

I tried to shut it down by hitting the power button and guessing how many times I had to hit return to tell various programs it was OK to shut down, but I guessed wrong. So I had to crash the computer by holding the power button down for 10 seconds, and then reboot. The screen came up blank again!

Finally I decided to "zap the parameter RAM." After this, the system came up with the screen visible. Whew. I put the computer to sleep and hit a key, and it woke up OK. Haven't had a problem since. I hope this is the end of that problem.

Part Two

Some months later my wife tried to wake her computer, and the screen stayed black. Rebooting, zapping PRAM, resetting the SMC, and changing display resolution didn't help. (The computer was running: I could hear the hard drive, and could access it via Screen Sharing; all the files were there.) Finally I called AppleCare and described the problem. They said to bring it in to the Apple Store. The store folks said it was a bad logic board and replaced it. We got the machine back 3 days later. Everything seemed fine after the repair, except that Time Machine failed with an error message because the machine's MAC address had changed. I used Airport Utility to delete the old backups for the machine and Time Machine started on a new backup.

This problem might have been caused by a brief power outage while the computer was sleeping, connected to an Apple Cinema Display that was plugged in to AC power. I should have had the display on a desktop UPS: I set this up, and subsequent power outages have not caused any problems.

Jumpy Trackpad

My friend Glenn had a strange experience with his MacBook Pro. The cursor started gliding around on its own, jumping from place to place on the screen, and issuing phantom clicks.

He took the battery out and ran the computer on the power adapter, and it worked fine. Put the battery back in, and the computer was screwy again. When he looked at the battery, he could see that its side was bulging. It was pressing on the underside of the trackpad and causing phantom touches.

He was prepared for an epic struggle with Apple, but it turns out this is a  known problem with some batteries, and as soon as he called AppleCare, they sent him a battery overnight.

(update) The same thing happened to me with my MacBook Pro, about 5 months after Glenn. The mouse wouldn't right-click. I turned the machine over and saw that the battery lid was lifted up a little and the battery was no longer flat. Called AppleCare and waited on hold for 20 minutes, then another 10 minutes of talking with the rep, who struggled with his screens and finally set me up with an appointment at the nearest Apple Store. The Apple Store guy looked at the battery and replaced it with a new one.

Mail won't search the entire message

I wanted to search for a word in past messages I had sent. Mail would not search message bodies, only From, To, and Subject. Clicking on Entire Message did not highlight it. I Googled, and discovered that others have had this problem. I checked that my hard drive was being indexed by Spotlight in its preferences. The solution that worked for me was to "rebuild the Launch Services database." I used a nice application called Cocktail to do this... one could Google for a terminal command line involving lsregister. After rebuilding and restarting Mail, searching would look in message bodies. (The one downside was that launching a few old applications got the message "this is the first time you have used this app, is this OK?")

Slow printer

I applied the Nov 2010 "HP Printer Update" on my Mac Mini. Printing a single page took over an hour on a HP Color LaserJet 2605. In  ► System Preferences... ► Print & Fax, I deleted the printers and re-added them. Printing worked fine after that.

Dead machine

We had a power outage during a storm. The Mac Mini was powered off at the time. When I tried to boot it, nothing happened. I Googled the instructions for resetting the SMC. Unplug the machine, wait, plug it in, boot. It worked fine.

AirPort Drive Crash

Our machines were suddenly unable to access the Internet: ssh connections closed, Mail showed errors, and web pages would not load, in a network configuration like that in the Home Networking page. Time Machine showed "backup delayed" and Time Machine Preferences showed that the disk (attached to the AirPort) was unavailable. AirPort utility said there was no AirPort device, even though I could see it sitting there with a green light on. I unplugged the AirPort and plugged it in again. The attached disk's light began to blink furiously. Machines on the network were able to see each other, but still had no Internet connectivity. I turned the disk off and back on. Web, Mail, and ssh connectivity was restored, Time Machine saw its disk volumes, and backups began.

Wireless Mouse Won't Connect

Neighbors asked me for help: their iMac's wireless mouse would not work. The  ► System Preferences... ► Bluetooth control panel showed that the mouse was not connecting. They put in fresh batteries but that did not help. It turned out their OS software was not up-to-date. Apple support document http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2845 suggested that updating the OS might fix it, and indeed, updating the OS software fixed the problem.

Screen Saver Crashing

On my Mac Mini, under OSX 10.6.3 through 10.6.7, the photo screen saver crashed every 25 minutes or so. A few times the whole machine crashed with a kernel panic. Hardware diags, disk utility, and memtest found no error. Falling back to 10.6.2 cured the problem. The crash dump shows a SIGSEGV in pthread_once referencing a null pointer, after some font related calls. Odd, since the photo screen saver does not show any text. I tried resetting the system and user font caches with atsutil databases -remove; didn't help. This problem went away when I installed Lion (10.7.2).

MacBook Pro Screen Flickering

My late 2008 15 inch MacBook Pro had a screen flickering problem for about 6 months. I observed a black flicker, affecting the top part of the screen, several times an hour. It happened on both the 9400M and the 9600GT video modes. I rebooted, zapped PRAM, adjusted screen resolution, stood on one foot: nothing helped. The MacBook Pro EFI Update 2.8 announced 3/1/12 fixed this problem.

Rsync Hangs

Using the stock rsync 2.6.9 on my Mac, sending files to a Fedora Linux machine worked fine for months. One day, running the same command hung, with no message. Quitting rsync and retrying hung on the same file. Trying it with the -vvvv argument produced a lot of output but no error message. I checked fink to see if there was a newer version available: fink describe rsync showed that fink had version 3.0.8-1. I installed tne new version with sudo fink install rsync. Trying rsync again did not hang: it aborted with an error message that it could not create a temp file. The target directory on the receiving system was owned by root. Using sudo chown on the Linux side to change the file to my ownership allowed rsync to synchronize successfully.

MacBook Pro Battery not Charging

An early 2008 15 inch MacBook Pro began to display Not Charging next to the battery indicator in the menu bar. This machine spent most of its time plugged in to the charger. System profiler showed that the battery was about 60% charged and was not charging. I tried resetting the SMC and zapping the PRAM, but that didn't help. I was resigned to buying a new battery. Then, on a trip, we used the machine for about an hour on battery, and then plugged in the charger. The battery began to charge as it should, and returned to 99% charge.

Open Problems

iPhoto Crashes and Screen Garbles

On my Mac Mini, under OSX 10.6.3 or greater, editing a sequence of photos with iPhoto 09 will eventually lead to screen garbles, application crashes, or system freezes. This problem persists in OSX 10.6.5. Haven't tried it yet with Lion.

Home | FAQ © 2010-2012, Tom Van Vleck updated 2012-05-18 15:09