Settle in, folks, because today we're going to take a break from the melodrama in Cupertino and focus instead on the melodrama on our very own desktop. See, we had a very unpleasant evening last night (and well into this morning), so we thought we'd share the pain a little by describing it to you in excruciating detail. After all, it's sort of a tradition for us to tell you all about our harrowing tech nightmares (longtime viewers will recall the Christmas PowerBook Ordeal and the many updates in our long-running D-S-Hell Saga), and this latest one had us fairly doubled over with crippling anxiety for a few hours. We're going to go out on a limb and say that it's never fun when a $6000 computer system suddenly stops working, but it's even less so when said computer just happens to die the night before you need to extract various bits of information for an appointment with the tax guy seventeen hours later.

So here's what kicked the whole thing off: we got word of a beta Mac OS X driver for a few Canon scanners, including the 1240U. Now, it just so happens that there's been a 1240U sitting idle and unplugged next to AtAT's main production system since December, and so we had this brilliant idea that we'd install said driver and give it a whirl, because we've got lots of fun little projects going on right now that could really benefit from a functional scanner. We, of course, decided to do this while blithely ignoring the implications of the word "beta." And, since Retrospect for Mac OS X only came out about three days ago, we also did this without backing up our data. The night before a tax appointment. This, you may have realized by now, was a supremely stupid thing to do.

Now, now-- give us a little credit, here. At least we read through the many comments posted to VersionTracker, and while there were plenty of complaints that the Canon driver installer was confusing and the driver itself only supports a few scanners, we didn't see a single message to the effect of "installing this driver completely hosed my hard disk." Then again, anyone whose hard disk had been hosed by said driver probably wouldn't have had a working system from which to post to VersionTracker. These are the little details that we often miss when the sleep deprivation starts getting profound.

So we downloaded the installer, read the instructions, completed the admittedly confusing installation procedure, and then, as directed, we restarted the system. It was at that point that our lives spiralled into despair and our spiffy Cinema Display popped up the dreaded "Disk With Flashing Question Mark," and we noticed some gnarly and decidedly worrisome grinding sounds emanating from the general direction of our dual-processor G4/800's hard drive. This is, as they say, never good. Especially since our QuickSilver has a very quiet disk, and an array of extremely loud fans. We pretty much never hear the disk doing anything over the constant jet-engine roar.

Well, first things first; we hit the restart button. After the usual startup chime, we were back to question-mark-disk and the grinding noises. Okay, well, the 80 GB hard drive had both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 on it; so we tried restarting again, this time with the Option key held down. For the uninitiated, this usually presents a screen graphically illustrating all the valid startup systems connected to the Mac and lets the user choose the one from which to boot. Instead of one Mac OS X installation and one Mac OS 9 system, we were presented only with the Mac OS 9 one. "Hmmmm, okay, so Mac OS X is nuked. Fair enough, we'll boot into 9 and see what we can do from there."

Select. Click. Why, hello Mr. Question Mark Disk. Oh, and you brought your friends, the Grindy Noises!

So, of course, by then we were starting to panic a little, but we managed to dig up the stack of CDs that shipped with our dual-800 former-Mac-now-doorstop, and started poking around for something that might help. The one that looked most immediately helpful was labeled "Apple Hardware Test: For Diagnosing Hardware Problems." Sounded like a good start to us. So we removed the disk from its protective sleeve, brought it over to the Mac, and spent a good solid twenty seconds starting at the drive with what we can only assume were comical looks on our faces.

See, that's one interesting thing about the QuickSilvers: there's no drive eject button. There isn't even one of those emergency paperclip eject holes visible from the outside. You're supposed to open and close the SuperDrive by pressing the Eject key on the Pro Keyboard. The only problem is, of course, if your Mac isn't booted and functional, that key is less help than the staff in the computer department at Sears. (Well, maybe it's not quite that bad-- at least if you poke at it, it moves a little.)

Now, after a few moments of holding this disk and staring blankly at the closed SuperDrive door, we suddenly recalled having seen something somewhere about a way to eject stuck disks via typing commands into Open Firmware, the Mac's inner guts which handle functions so primordial they're not even part of the system software; indeed, they're used to load the system software. Unfortunately, that's about all we knew about it. But as it turns out, we're lucky enough to be a multi-Mac household. Out came the PowerBook, and a quick search for "open firmware" and "eject cd" on Google yielded a tip page from Macworld, which informed us that to eject a CD from Open Firmware one types, appropriately enough, "eject cd." And it confirmed our vague recollection that to boot into Open Firmware, we just needed to hold down Command-Option-O-F while restarting.

Okay, so back to the restart button, and bang, we were in Open Firmware, which consists of a big white screen with small black words on it. We typed "eject cd," pressed Enter, and bickety-bam, the SuperDrive tray popped open. Now we were in business-- or at least in business to get in business. We restarted yet again with the "C" key held down, which forced the Mac to boot from the Apple Hardware Test CD. What we wound up with was a pleasant-looking screen that allowed us to run a battery of basic hardware tests. We did. And the "Mass Storage" test came back A-okay, so at least we didn't appear to be dealing with a physically wrecked hard drive.

Next up, we tried booting from the Mac OS X Install CD. The installer loaded up and found our hard disk (and even correctly identified it as "The Velma"), but the disk was greyed out in the installer. When we tried to select it, the installer helpfully informed us that "this disk is dimmed because the CD installs in different languages." We pondered that Zenlike information for about half a minute, shook it off, cleared our minds, and next tried booting from the Mac OS 9 Install CD.

That experience went slightly better, since this time around we could actually see our hard disk (minus its custom icon) mounted on the Mac OS 9 Desktop. We opened it up and poked around; nothing looked out of the ordinary. So we fired up Disk First Aid from the Mac OS 9 CD and clicked "Verify." Lo and behold, DFA found all sorts of fun red errors, and when it was done telling us all about how messed up our drive was, it politely informed us that it couldn't actually fix any of the problems. Still, we considered this to be progress.

There was just one problem: while we're embarrassed by our lack of preparation, we just didn't have an up-to-date copy of Norton Utilities, Drive 10, etc. handy. What to do? Wait until morning, and drive to a local Apple retail store? That's when we remembered that we had shelled out some extra buckage on an AppleCare Protection Plan for this particular Mac, and so we went digging through the debris in our basement for the little white box with the red Apple logo on it.

See, some people don't realize this, but AppleCare gets you more than just a two-year warranty extension on your hardware purchase; it just so happens that it also ships with a copy of TechTool Deluxe, which we assume is some slightly neutered version of TechTool Pro. So we restarted once again, this time booting from the AppleCare Protection Plan CD; we half-expected it not to boot at all, since we had this nagging concern that our particular prepackaged AppleCare box had been shrinkwrapped before the QuickSilver Power Macs even existed, but luckily it booted right into Mac OS 9.1.2 and came up like a charm.

So we launched TechTool Deluxe and let it do its thing. "Its thing," incidentally, appears to consist of some basic hardware checks and a pretty solid disk diagnosis and repair utility. Just like Disk First Aid, TechTool found errors. Many of them. Entirely unlike Disk First Aid, TechTool actually offered to try to fix them, too. We let it.

What followed was forty-five minutes of slowly-advancing progress bars indicating that TechTool was hard at work reflangulating the B-Tree and demesmerizing the volume map or whatever. Fully thirty minutes of that appeared to consist of multiple attempts to "rebuild the catalog file," which didn't inspire confidence; at one point we found ourselves staring at a completely solid and unchanging progress bar for ten straight minutes, but eventually that bar was replaced with yet another "rebuilding catalog file" instance.

However, after chewing on our sick disk for forty-five minutes, TechTool finally informed us that it had created a "check volume" and mounted it on the Desktop; we were to compare its contents to that of "The Velma" and make sure that everything looked okay. Once we did that, we poked through TechTool's "technical comparison" between the original disk and the check volume; there were several differences, but they had been flagged as "favorable" and colored a peaceful, encouraging green, so we figured those were okay. There was one difference flagged as a scary red "unusual change," but at that point, we didn't see much choice other than to click "Replace" and let TechTool try to recover our disk. So we did. And it did. After all, what's a missing 895 leaf records in the Catalog B-Tree between friends?

At that point, our disk was supposedly fixed, and thus ended the longest ninety minutes we've spent since we sat through the movie version of The Mod Squad, Claire Danes notwithstanding. We crossed our fingers, held our breath, and restarted.

Question mark. Grindy noise. Loud eruption of expletives. (The expletives erupted from us, not from the Mac. Had they come from the Mac, we might have considered that to be progress.)

So we booted back into the AppleCare disk and prepared to run TechTool a second time, when, purely on a whim, we figured we'd make a quick trip to the Startup Disk control panel just to see what was there. Interestingly enough, it reported two valid systems on The Velma: Mac OS 9.1.2, and Mac OS X 10.1.3. What was particularly surprising about that was that we were dead certain that we were running some version of 9.2.x before this whole ordeal began. The Mac OS 9 system was selected. Just for kicks (and to delay the ordeal of sitting through another forty-five minutes of TechTool progress bars), we clicked "Mac OS X" and then restarted.

Against all odds, we saw a Smiley Mac! And we're pretty sure we heard a choir of angels, too.

Yes, Mac OS X booted right up as if nothing had happened. We launched OmniWeb and surfed a few pages; everything seemed fine. And then, with the slightest bit of trepidation, we tried firing up a Classic app. Classic started up without a hitch-- into 9.2, we might add. We haven't done a whole lot of comprehensive testing, but as far as we could tell from a cursory glance at 2 AM, everything seemed just splefty.

We should probably mention that while this whole thing started with the installation of a beta driver, we can't be entirely sure that wasn't just a coincidence; Mac OS X being what it is, we hardly ever restart that QuickSilver, so maybe the disk damage was already present and lurking long before we installed Canon's new software. We don't know. In any case, though, it's probably not a bad thing that the word "beta" has taken on scary new overtones in our minds. If the Canon beta was responsible, then we've entered a frightening new realm; under Mac OS 9 and earlier, if a beta driver caused problems, generally all we had to do was restart without extensions, trash the driver, and wait for the release version. This was a whole 'nother ball of wax.

That said, it's worth pointing out that what amounts to the worst Mac debacle we've suffered in recent memory was resolved in just a few hours, with minimal if any data loss, and no permanent physical scars; what's more, it was fixed using only tools that came with our original Mac and AppleCare purchase. Compared to some of these weeks- or even months-long technical nightmares we hear about in the Wintel world, we number ourselves among the lucky ones, as should you. Sure, things go bad on the Mac side of the fence, just as they do with Wintels-- but based strictly on unscientific anecdotal evidence, we definitely get the sense that we Mac users get the cleaner end of the stick (not to mention the end without all the rusty nails, razor wire, and flesh-eating bacteria).

Any other morals in this incredibly long and rambling tale? Well, first of all, now that we have the option, we're going to rush right out and upgrade our copies of Retrospect Express to the new Mac OS X version and get back on a regular backup regimen ASAP. We're also going to invest in some full-featured disk utilities and keep them in one of those red wall-mounted boxes with the little hammer and the sign saying "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS." Most importantly, we're probably going to think twice about messing with system-level beta software the night before an appointment with the Bob the Tax Guy. We also think there might be something in there about not playing with matches or running with the scissors, but we're not sure. All we know is that we're now going to start catching up on lost time (and lost sleep) by hauling together various disparate bits of AtAT's financial history, ragged as it is, for Bob's no-doubt-disapproving perusal.

And no, we haven't tried using the scanner yet.