A question for the real techies!

[Benbikeman]

What a nightmare week ... but won't bore you with the story, suffice it to say kernal panics, unmountable volumes, a million different possible diagnoses, more Time Machine restores than you can shake a stick at ...

Anyway, to the question. There are two bootable volumes on my Mac: both OSX 10.8.1, one completely clean one that I'm booted into now, one with migrated apps and data. Let's call them Clean Volume and Disaster Volume.

Disaster Volume is kernal panicking and is intermittently mountable. However, the volume is current readable when booted from Clean Volume.

Is there any way for me to retrieve the console logs from Disaster Volume while booted from Clean Volume? I want to send the logs to AppleCare to see if they can figure out what is causing the crash, but when I tried booting into Disaster Volume and opening Console I got another kernal panic.

Ben

 

[charlieegan3]

if the disaster volume is readable from the clean one then isn't it just a case of opening up the log files in the disaster one while booted into the clean one?

the log files are here: (see logs sub heading)
http://guides.macrumors.com/Console

 

[elchemor]

disaster

do not open "Console", just copy the system.log files that are located at /var/log/ while ur booted from the disaster volume.

did you try creating a new clean user and checked if you have the same symptoms while working on disaster volume ?

 

[Benbikeman]

the log files are here: (see logs sub heading)
http://guides.macrumors.com/Console

Thanks, Charlie.

Having just had another discussion with AppleCare, it looks like I'm just going to bite the bullet and reinstall everything from scratch. That'll be my weekend, then ...

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did you try creating a new clean user and checked if you have the same symptoms while working on disaster volume ?

Yeah, disaster volume is a disaster no matter what user and no matter whether booted from it or not. Bite the bullet time.

 

[charlieegan3]

Thanks, Charlie.

Having just had another discussion with AppleCare, it looks like I'm just going to bite the bullet and reinstall everything from scratch. That'll be my weekend, then ...

I can think of a worse weekend, I find getting stuff sorted and cleaned up quite satisfying. Have fun.

Charlie

 

[Benbikeman]

I can think of a worse weekend, I find getting stuff sorted and cleaned up quite satisfying.

Excellent, what time can I expect you?

 

[charlieegan3]

Excellent, what time can I expect you?

Trust me I would but I'm steering well clear of London till all the various sporting events are done.

 

[3282868]

If you want to save time, if/when I clean install to a 10.X update I don't "Time Machine" restore. I'll wipe the drive (after making a boot volume first, USB or DVD), install the OS, then copy over various plists in my ~/Library/ and /Library/ folder(s) and may drag and drop a few small apps into my Applications folder. As these apps aren't system related, my preferences will be restored on a clean OS and will save me from registering app's again. Other app's such as Adobe, iLife, iWork, MS Office I'll install from scratch.

Also, if you have any .ssh folders or the such (these hidden folders are in your home folder and contact your SHSH files for your iDevices), copy those directories into your newly installed home folder. You may also want to weed through your user Library folder for your MobileDevice backups folder and anything else you may wish to preserve. Again, these will not effect your system and while it may seem daunting at first it's a safe way in retaining your personal data without inadvertently restoring faulty apps/files that may be contributing to your systems inability to boot/operate.

I've done this for years, and it definitely helped when updating to 10.8.

Good luck!

 

[desertman]

... kernel panics, unmountable volumes, a million different possible diagnoses ...

A couple of months ago I had similiar symptoms and in the end it was a defective hard drive that at the beginning of the problems did not show its SMART status as "Failed" but still as "Verified". Only after several weeks it switched to "Failed".

I had several partitions (= volumes) on one pysical hard drive and in the beginning only problems with one volume while another volume with a clean OS X worked fine.

Hopefully you are not in such a situation.

Just because it cannot harm I would suggest to go through all three stages of the "Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner" cache cleaning routine. And if you happen to have DiskWarrior I would let it rebuild the directory structure of the trouble-making volume.

 

[Benbikeman]

Hopefully you are not in such a situation.

No, the same symptoms manifested on the migrated volume on a different physical drive mounted in a different physical bay, so it's definitely software rather than hardware.

Just because it cannot harm I would suggest to go through all three stages of the "Mountain Lion Cache Cleaner" cache cleaning routine. And if you happen to have DiskWarrior I would let it rebuild the directory structure of the trouble-making volume.

I'll take a look at those, thanks.

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copy over various plists in my ~/Library/ and /Library/ folder(s) and may drag and drop a few small apps into my Applications folder. As these apps aren't system related, my preferences will be restored on a clean OS and will save me from registering app's again.

Thanks, given the history I'm going to play totally safe and rebuild from scratch. It's a pain, but will give peace of mind.