TheWeeJenny.net

I posted this on my private LJ and on the forums, but it got a bit of a lol so I thought I’d share it here too. ^_^

I don’t know if I’ve posted much about my Macbook here, so to set the stage a bit I must begin by stating 2 things; first, that I’ve had it for about six months now and am rather well settled into the new computing environment; second, six months is exactly long enough to feel like you pretty much know how everything works, but is not quite long enough to actually know how everything works. It’s just enough time and know-how to really really screw stuff up.

Ya see, I’ve used Bootcamp to run Windows on a separate partition so I can play the MMO’s me and James are into (lord of the rings online and eve online at the moment). This is all well and good, but a bit of a pain booting between the two because it takes a bit longer for OS X to fully startup from shutdown (though it is quite fast once you’ve got it going). There is a software out there called Parallels — at least a couple of folks on my f-list have heard of it I’m sure — that allows you to run windows in a sort of emulator window in OS X without the need to boot into a different partiition. Up to now it hasn’t really been capable of running 3D games, but the newest version is being advertised as 3D graphics capable.

I thought, “hmm, they say it’ll run Halo 2, maybe it’ll run what I play” and downloaded the trial. I was able to startup the already installed Windows partition, and the emulation was really slick, but alas Eve would not start. Neither would LotrO. In fact the whole thing went so weird and blinky when I tried I figured I’d just uninstall it and try again in a few months to see if it gets any better.

Unfortunately, the uninstall was a bit problematic. When I first installed the program I tried installing a new virtual instance of windows to see what it was like, but it wouldn’t take my serial for some reason so I didn’t test it beyond that. I may have just entered it wrong, but I wasn’t too fussed since I’d just wanted to see what the install was like anyway. I drug that one to the trash and moved on to testing my Bootcamp-installed windows. I’d tried a free emulator once upon a time and in that instance, dragging the virutal machine’s icon to the trash uninstalled it. Not so this time. I used Parallel’s built in uninstall but there were still 2 or so gigs sitting somewhere on my hard drive.

I used Grand Perspective (lovely program that gives you a visual representation of all the files on your system) to find large files and deduce which ones were the ones I needed to remove manually. What I was looking for was a folder with something like ‘vm’ for “virtual machine” in it’s name. Like a doofus, I deleted the wrong folder that was titled “vm”, which was found under private/var/vm. In fact I deleted everything from “var” on down.

Much more experienced and knowledgeable Mac users are laughing their arses off at me about now. u_u

Those are some pretty important files indeed. Nestled within their hidden confines are the files that remember what your admin password is. This means, that to remove them you have to enter your password, and to put them back you have to enter your password, only with that folder empty the system has no way to know that the password you’re entering is the right one.

Feck.

There may have been a simple workaround for it, but I couldn’t find one, so in the end I did something similar to the non-destructive re-install that you can do in Windows. All my files were moved into a file called “previous system” and the OS was installed afresh, along with a new admin account and password. That would be the end of the story, except that my silliness knows no bounds.

I tried to put the libraries back where they should be, but I forgot that there are several of them and so transfered so many into the wrong directories that it was impossible for me to figure out what I’d done wrong and needed to undo.

In the end, my important files were fairly easily saved. I was fully able to back everything up to our portable drive, but I lost my downloaded emails and address book entries. I feel rather silly about those because they’re so bloody easy to backup that I hadn’t bothered to for a while, figuring it wouldn’t come up without at least enough forewarning to email them to myself. I may even have an older backup somewhere but it would be a bit out of date now, I’ll have to make sure.

The only thing really bothersome is that I lost a whole day to backing up and reinstalling. But hey, it could have been worse.