A Tale of Woe and Recovery

[Charles Martin]

Hey folks, I hope you won't mind me sharing my afternoon adventures on 
a couple of these lists. Today, for only the second time in my history 
with OS X (three years already?!), I accidentally trashed my machine. A 
few hours later, I was back. Read on if you want to know why. Hopefully 
it will help others.

The system in question here is an iMac G3 700 happily running 10.2.4. I 
was doing a little video processing on this thing (I have other 
machines, some better suited for the task, but I love this little 
thing!). Specifically, I was taking videos I had downloaded off the net 
(music videos -- get your mind out of the gutter! :) and converting 
them to MPEG-1 to use in a compilation VCD I was going to make.

One particularly exotic DiVX-based AVI file stubbornly refused to 
submit to the charms of any of my usual bag of tricks. I went to 
versiontracker.com and tried various searches for tools I didn't 
already have and came up with one: ConvertToQt 1.1b.

I ran it and it looked like was processing my AVI file. And looked ... 
and looked. After ten minutes (the original AVI had a running time of 
about 1 minute), I force-quit the app.

**HERE IS WHERE I MADE MY BIG MISTAKE:**

What I did *not* notice at the time I force-quit the app was that it 
had eaten EVERY BIT of my available hard drive space (almost 13 gig!) 
in trying to convert the AVI file. What I *should* have done after 
force-quitting a conversion app (any conversion-type app, they all 
require temp files) is hunt for the invisible "temp" file that was 
created.

Instead of being all smart like that, I didn't notice it and carried on 
working on other stuff. I quickly noticed that when I tried to 
download, I got an error. ITunes couldn't encode any songs at all -- 
some kind of "disk full" message?? WTF?? Then I noticed I couldn't save 
ANYTHING AT ALL. Oh boy. Don't panic.

So I restarted the machine. Oh dear. It booted, but now not only were 
my Finder prefs completely messed up (my Dock was TOTALLY different!), 
I finally noticed I had only 186MB of free drive space. That's not 
enough to safely run OS X.

I rebooted from a OS 9.2 custom CD I had made with DiskWarrior on it. 
It found a very corrupted directory and fixed it over the course of 
about an hour. Whew!

But I was not out of the woods yet. My user prefs were still hosed, and 
I still had something eating up all my free HD space. If I tried to run 
any system-based service from my HD (like Find File for example) it 
would cause the Finder to quit. Bad.

I banged my head for quite a while trying to figure out how to find and 
delete a giant invisible temp file without using any applications. 
Finally I decided to see if the "View" settings in the Finder could be 
changed. Oh good, they could. I changed them to show all folder sizes. 
Oh yeah, that lead me right to the problem area. My user folder, my 
video projects folder. Well duh. Still couldn't actually see the 
offending file, though.

I trashed the folder the video project had been in (I had a backup from 
before I had started this so I wasn't losing anything important). 
Voila! 13 gigs of HD space magically reappeared!

I rebooted and ran fsck and "repair permissions." Minor stuff to fix on 
both. Okay, I'm up and running again, but what about my totally hosed 
Finder and Apple system prefs?

Brainstorm! I had recently backed up these exact files (along with the 
rest of my user prefs) using a simple Applescript called (cunningly) 
"Back up user prefs 2.3.5." I located the CD I had burned with those 
files on it, but instead of doing a full restore (since the backup was 
about two weeks old), I opted to manually replace the affected 
com.apple.<service or app name>.plist files by hand. I replaced 
com.apple.finder.plist and about half a dozen others (such as 
com.apple.internetconfig.plist, com.apple.dock.plist etc), rebooted and 
... WOW! Right back to where I started.

No system reinstall required. Whew!!

So, what have we learned today?

1. Beta software can sometimes bite you in the butt. It was really my 
fault that things got as bad as they did, but ConvertToQt is off my 
list of tools for good. Any app that can write temp files into other 
files' space has no place on my Mac.

2. Keep regular backups of your personal projects!! Can't repeat that 
often enough.

3. Back up your user prefs too. Saves a lot of time and may prevent a 
system reinstall.

4. DON'T PANIC. I would have lost a LOT more data if I had panicked.

Glad to be back,
Chas