David Emery Online

Genius Bar

5 June 2007

As mentioned yesterday, today I took my ever-ailing MacBook to the genius bar at my local Apple Store. Now, I don’t want to jinx things – quite possible, in this instance I think – but it seems I may have come across the weirdest problem I’ve ever heard of.

To set the scene, in January my MacBook died; the HD started making a “clicking” sound on boot, and couldn’t be seen by the OS installer. So, I popped in a replacement HD and tried to do a fresh install from the CDs that came with it, but it never managed to install successfully – it would error out every time.

So, off it went to Apple – for 4 weeks – and it came back with a new HD, new logic board and a new top case. When I came to doing a fresh install it error-ed a couple of times, but worked on the third time so I thought nothing of it. Now, I’ve had a number of random kernal panics in the months since, and the HD died again in similar circumstances, although I didn’t think too much of it as it was a larger disk from another MacBook owner who’d upgraded their original HD. Again, while installing the OS for the third time it error-ed while installing, which set me thinking – along with the second HD failure – that there was still a hardware problem.

Which brings us pretty much up to today – the kernal panics got more frequent (almost every other boot), until on Wednesday my backup failed (shall we not go into the fact that it took two HDs dying on me before I started properly backing up? SuperDuper rocks, by the way…) and then on Friday every time I’d open a file, the application opening it would quit. Great.

Trying to reinstall the OS went through a similar, broken process involving lots of failed installs, until it got to a state where it would kernal panic on boot, every time.

So, what’s the problem then?

Out of all these incidents, what is the weak link?

The install disks.

Seriously.

After testing all the hardware – all fine – the genius did a OS install from an external HD, which went fine, and the machine seems to be back in full health. So it’s either the install disks, or – I guess – the DVD drive. It’s also worse noting that it would boot fine of the install disks, and the Disk Warrior disk, which would also indicate a software, not hardware, problem.

Here’s hoping that it’s the right diagnosis!