The computer won't boot!

If you do not have a backup of your system folder and your system does not boot (start up), what do you do?
Prepare for a complete reinstall of your system.

Consider the following episode:

I turned on my computer today and it hung. The hard drive didn't appear in the upper right hand corner of the Finder and then the mouse froze. *Sigh* Using the [command] [control] [power] to reboot (warm reboot), the computer did restart "normally" (I felt the dread of a hard drive failure coming on). IF I powered the system down, the computer would hang again, but the computer would work if I did a warm reboot. I could have just started to work, but I really wanted to get to the bottom of this problem. Fearing that the boot drive was having some type of coronary, I did a check with disk first aid and Norton Utilities to see if they found anything. Disk first aid gave a clean bill of health. Norton found some bundle bits that needed repair so I powered down the system and restarted the computer just to humor myself. The computer still hung. OK.

What do I know so far? The directory structure of the hard drive is completely intact and the hard drive is not mounting in the Finder on a cold boot. Is the SCSI driver on the hard drive messing up; is there some termination problem on the SCSI chain? I did connect someone's zip drive the other day and unplugged all my drives. Maybe the connector is loose? Maybe, but I usually check hardware problems last., unless experience tells me an exact reason to do otherwise. The last possibility is that the system folder is messed up somehow.

Given the choices, the system folder is the easiest and most likely source of the problem. The most common part of the system folder to go bad are the preferences and the extensions. So I decided to cold boot the computer with the shift key down to disable extensions. The computer booted fine; thus, now I know there is a problem in the extensions folder. OK, cool. I rebooted the computer again, so I could access my CD-ROM drive and popped in my CD-R system archive. I moved the current exstensions folder out of the system folder and copied in the extensions folder from the backup CD-R. When I cold booted the system, it worked fine. Problem solved.

If I had not had a duplicate of my system folder, I would have had to isolate the bad extension and then reinstall the software that provided the offending extension. Time consuming, annoying, and boring all at the same time.

What if the hard drive was going south. Even more annoying, but my system is backed up onto a CD-R. My computer could burn up and I would still have my entire system setup on CDs. When I couldn't afford a CD-R, I did the next best thing by having an external hard drive with a duplicate system folder. Then I could boot from the external to fix the internal and visa versa.

It will never happen to me!

I told a friend once to make a duplicate of the system folder onto her second hard drive for the above reasons. A different friend told her that the duplicate would mess up her system (This may be the case but I have never actually seen it happen), so the duplicate system folder was summarily deleted. A couple weeks later, the system folder got corrupted. She did not have a backup. About a month went by before her system was in working order again. I was beside myself since I know the system could have been fixed in half an hour with the backup system folder that used to be on the other hard drive. This individual who told her to delete the backup should be shot especially because these files could have at least been put on a Zip drive.

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