Routine is Your Friend!

It has been said, “Routine is your friend.” I am here to say that is completely true. Sticking to one routine in particular would have saved me a lot of headache troubleshooting a computer issue this evening. At one point I was genuinely worried that my Mac was dead and would need to be sent out for repairs. Which would have been very bad luck, since it was only one week ago that my Xbox 360 died and needed to be sent away (it's still within warranty, fortunately!).

Because of another issue I was having, I went to reboot my Mac, and it wouldn't actually reboot. It just hung indefinitely at a solid grey screen, and the same thing happened with all other attempts. Even when I left it and went to the living room to watch something for a bit, I came back to the same grey screen. I'll spare you the tale of my troubleshooting attempts (which would be quite the tale in and of itself), and skip to the end.

I have what is called an hard drive dock. It's sort of like an iPod dock except bigger, and designed for computer internal hard drives. Those of you who work with me may have seen a hard drive on my desk—I use that as an off-site backup. I occasionally take it home, power on the dock, pop in the HD, let Carbon Copy Cloner do its thing, eject the drive from my Mac's desktop, power off the dock, remove the HD, then take it back to work the next morning so it once again meets the “off-site” part of “off-site backup.”

It turns out that the last time I updated it, I missed my “power off the dock” step. You wouldn't think that would be important, but it seems that little thing was the cause of all my problems. After I finally determined that to be the cause, with repeated testing I confirmed that my Mac indeed only boots up fine when this HD dock isn't turned on.

Of course, I have formulated a theory about why this is the case. My hunch is that, as part of the boot process, the Mac firmware enumerates all the attached HDs. And since there was no physical HD plugged into the dock the Mac hung indefinitely trying to read the disc that it thought should be there but actually wasn't. I'm definitely going to have to test this the next time I bring home my HD. If my hunch is correct, having the dock turned on but with an HD in it should allow my Mac to reboot correctly.

But is it a Mac issue? An odd quirk of this HD dock in particular? Or something that can be duplicated using any HD dock on any modern computer? But you know what, at this point I really don't care. As long as I stick to my routine and switch it off when my backup is complete I won't have further problems, and if I do slip up sometime, at least I know what to check right away.