My Mac is Recovering from a Coffee Binge

To make a long story short, yesterday during a meeting my MacBook Pro decided to drink a cup of coffee. Two trips to the Apple Store later, I'm almost back in business. Now all I need to do is restore my hard drive from a backup I made with Disk Utility.

You'd think that would be simple enough, but as it turns out, you'd be wrong. There's a design bug in Disk Utility that prevents restoring a startup disk from an image, as described in this Apple Knowledge Base article.

I'm left with two options, both of which will require a third trip to the Apple Store:

1. Start up from an external Firewire drive (which I don't have)
2. Start up in Target Disk mode and connect to another Mac (which I do have) with a FireWire cable (which I don't have)

Maybe today I'll go for a chance of scenery and try the Apple Store at the Domain instead of Barton Creek Mall. Ugh.

Postscript: The story has a surprisingly happy ending. After several ounces of coffee flowed through my MacBook Pro, it seemed to have given up the ghost. But over the course of the day it gradually recovered, presumably as things dried out. I've been told that the fluid will cause corrosion and eventual hardware failure, but since Apple's only "solution" is to replace any parts that got coffee on them, I'm going to wait until they actually fail before paying to replace them. In the mean time my backup regimen has become much more of a priority—I'll be setting up an external FireWire drive with copy of my internal drive, updated four times a day.

This incident has made me realize how dependent I am on client-side apps, despite my use of Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. I use both iCal and Mail.app as aggregation points for several Google accounts. Checking each one of them manually on the web is unworkable. I also make very heavy use of Mail.app's filtering and folders. Trying to read my email in Google's web interface where it's not sorted is close to impossible. I'm glad to have my Mac back.

Comments

[Michael Buckbee]

I'd recommend going with the firewire external drive option as you can then use it as a continuing place for a hot backup of your mac when you run into this situation again.

[Charlie Wood]

Michael,

Thanks for the recommendation. I think you're right. A bootable external Firewire drive (instead of the non-bootable external USB 2.0 drive I've been using) would have made this experience less pinful. Lesson learned.

Thanks,
Charlie