Last week I decided to install ubuntu and turn my macbook into a triple boot system. The reason was curiosity of how well this can be acomplished.

But it went bad, very bad….

Since I used already used BootCamp to install a Windows XP, I used the mac-home-brew program ‘disk utility’ to create a partition for ubuntu. The day before I made a backup of my system and cleaned my harddrive. I had 60GB free disk space!

With ‘disk utility’ I began to create a new partition, about 30GB. But unfortunately the partition program
crashed…

Actually the partition program didn’t crash, leopard crashed. One of those

system crashed, hold down the powerbutton ….

the blue-screen aquivalent of OSX. After restarting the system I discovered, that no partition was created, but instead of my 60GB free space on the hard-drive there were only 20GB available!

I ran the ‘disk utility’ programm again (yes, I had still hope), that time to check my disk. The ‘repair-mode’ was not enabled, I had to ‘verify’ my disk first, which is exactly what I did. It detected
some errors about indexing etc [no surprise there]. ‘Repair-Mode’ still not enabled I googled with the error messages and among the first results whas a apple.com support page.

Their Advice on their page was:

[...] You can ignore those error messages, the system will work just fine [...]

WTF? What advice is that? Working just fine? that bl… tool just ate 40GB of my harddisk! In the sense of ‘customer-feedback’ there was a poll just below that magnificient advice asking

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You can imagine where my frustration went.

With no other option left I restored the images disk from ‘time machine’ and got my drive back
the way it was. [windows XP still booting!]

I’m backing up regularly as you can imagine. After restoring my drive I made the updates I needed
and wanted to backup again. [just 2 be on the save side]. So I started the backup and went shopping.
After returning an hour later ‘time machine’ has backed up 10KB already….

Wait. …. 10KB?

You know, there are days you should have stayed in bed.

1. If you still have your time machine icon in the doc, you can ctrl-click it and select ‘backup now’
2. If you don’t, as I have because I like to have my dock as simple as possible, you can do it on the cmd-line. Yes cmd-line, hurray, linux forever, ahemm… sorry, short outburst…
   here is the command:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper