Last week, my employer hired a contractor to replace the carpet on
the floor of the building where I work. I shut down my OS X
machine before I left, so that I could put it on top of the desk before
they began working on the carpet. The machine refused to shut
down. It would power off, then right back on again, even though
none of the system preferences were set to cause automatic
power-on. Eventually, I had to shut it down by pulling the plug
once it had automatically powered off.
I disconnected the machine
and got it out of the way of the carpeting workers. They did their job
over the weekend and I returned on Monday morning and sat down to do
some critical work with OS X. The machine refused to boot. I
brought it up with a CD and fired up Disk Utility. The hard drive
showed as completely blank. Nothing on it, not even a
partition. I tried repairing the disk with OS X's Disk Utility
and Norton. Again, nothing on the disk.
I ended up
having to repartition the drive, reformat it, and reinstall Mac OS X
10.4. I still have no explanation why the machine behaved as it
did, and why it blew away the boot partition on the hard drive.
I've never seen anything like this in 10 years of Microsoft Windows
use. But I've seen several similar system corruption problems
on OS X – though nothing this severe.
Yet another reason why Mac
OS X sucks…