I thought things were bad last night, but they got significantly worse today. I decided to restart the PowerBook this morning to get MySQL to auto-start itself again (since I couldn’t remember the ‘mysql’ user password and was too lazy to reset it) – bad move.

When the PowerBook came back, it was acting similar to the Quad. Unresponsive, spinning beach balls, no load on the system – just no response. Also, constant quiet disk activity. I had to hard boot it a couple of times because it became totally unresponsive, and after the 2nd or 3rd time it wouldn’t boot up anymore.

Booting into single user mode and repairing the disk brought it back, but it’s not fully back up to speed yet. It’s still hanging and spinning at times, and taking forever to do things that normally only take a few instants (it took about 30-45 seconds to select a name in the buddy list in Adium).

If you said this sounds like a virus, I might have to agree with you. I’m installing the latest system updates right now (10.4.4), in the hopes that different = better. We shall see.

I can’t believe my Windows laptop is now my reliable machine.

While all this was going on, I tried to get the Quad working again too. The prognosis here is not any better – the disk is corrupted and likely beyond repair. Apple’s Disk Utility said “no can do”, and I’m trying Alsoft’s Disk Warrior now – without many expectations.

Naturally, my vaunted backup system has been offline since about Dec 10th as I intend to transition it to the Mac mini. Fortunately, that only translates to about 2-3 weeks of development time on the Quad as I was travelling so much. I was able to boot from the clone I made and copy over the handful of files I’d generated since then that weren’t under source control.

I believe I’ll need to reformat the Quad disks and repopulate them with the clone from early Dec., then restore the recovered files by hand. I’ve *got* to get that backup system online again.

So I’ve got a potential resolution (though not a good one) for the Quad issues, but no idea what to do about the PowerBook. Has anyone heard about a virus or rootkit going around for OS X?

Oh, and I found out I’ve got to call DirecTV to get the TiVo replaced… can’t wait for that one.