Jon Sheppard’s Blog

Blue Screen of Death on a Mac?

I had my first major issue with my MacBook the other day. Before going to work, I shut down my computer instead of just closing it to sleep for the drive to work. When I got to work, I turned on my MacBook and after the Apple screen I saw a blue screen that didn’t look anything like this:

I gasped, “This is a Mac, there’s no blue screen of death!” After restarting the computer several times, I realized that I was not going to be able to get to the login screen and that I would be stuck staring at a blue screen all day. I asked my friend Dan (like I always do) for some advice on what to do. He suggested clearing the PRAM so we did, no luck. Because I hadn’t been using Time Machine, I used my Leopard disk and a 500 GB hard drive to make a copy of my hard drive to preserve my data and settings. This was a time intensive process but worked like magic.

After I had copied over all of my data, I reinstalled Leopard and then used the Migration Assistant to import all of my stuff back to the MacBook. The migration went smoothly and I was able to get to the login screen (no blue screen of death, w00t!). The problem at that point was that when I typed in my login password it told me that I had entered the wrong password. I was typing the correct password but I tried every password I have ever used for anything but to no avail. I ended finding an article on LifeHacker that showed me how to create an admin user from single-user mode and so that I could change my admin user account’s password. That worked like a charm.

6 hours and several evil thoughts later, I was up and running on my MacBook with everything the way it should be.

Lessons Learned

• Use Time Machine!
• Always have friends that are geekier than you are

I still have no idea why I was getting that blue screen of death.