It was on a dreary night of Novemb...no wait hang on that's not right. Actually, it was in April, a rather pleasant evening. I had failed once before, almost a year ago, in fact. Defeated by the boot screen, the challenge proved too great for a mere mortal such as myself. Yet I had been attacked by the fatal passion, I longed for OS X; a utopia of sleek modern design, a beacon of style, an exquisite gem among the ugly costume jewellery of Windows.
"Buy a Mac" you say? "Pah!", I reply, grimacing at the very though of spending such an amount on a machine I cannot upgrade. So I set off on my voyage of discovery, a re-discovery of just how much I detested literally anything to do with SSDs or HDDs. The installation of OS X was just one of the many issues I've had with any kind of data storage in my time. Like a Siren, they reel you in with their promise of fast speeds and data security, only to crush your hopes and dreams when it counts.
And so it begun. 1700 hours, and I still haven't managed to get the sodding Windows system image utility to work, after initially reporting that it would take 40 hours to image around 400GB of data. (I used Macrium Reflect in the end, and I would thoroughly recommend anyone else considering OS X does the same, as it gives you a nice easy exit route should you decide you want out).
With that done, I proceeded to follow a man on Youtube to create my clover disk, after also going through the pain and agony inflicted upon me by the El Capitan download, which was completed over many, many hours on a virtual machine (whilst connected to my 150Mb internet might I add).
2000 hours. I say my last goodbyes to my parents to retreat upstairs, knowing full well I was about to willingly enter into the jaws of death, only greeted by pain, torment, and anger.
2045 hours. Well, that was a surprise, it doesn't work. The bar for installation gets about half way before it decides its had enough progress for one day, and proceeds to blacken my screen and force me to reboot back onto Windows. To Reddit!
2100 hours. (I'm honestly making this up now, I know I started at 8PM, but the rest of the night was a blur to be brutally honest). Ask and ye shall receive. A very kind fellow offers advice, assistance, a way to escape the gaping void that embodies the lack of knowledge. I take his advice and continue to confer, moving to my phone for contact.
2130 hours. Still no closer, and exhausted from internally shouting at my computer, desperate for it to just work. Remember that kind fellow? Well, that 'kind fellow', was /u/corpnewt. This man, nay, this demigod, proceeded to offer some random guy on the internet better assistance than any I've had before.
002849127 hours. Through literally no work of my own, we managed to get OS X installed on my machine through the USB. Turns out that I had ticked some stuff I shouldn't have in the Clover boot drive utility. We also ran into the small problem of my entire SSD becoming corrupted for literally no apparent reason other than to fuck me right off (see, they are among us, just waiting to pounce). This resulted in an entire format, and reformat of my entire SSD, along with re-configuring the Clover boot installation a number of times. Team viewer got a lifetime of use in one night, and the problems were solved not just through this, but via plenty of terminal commands I scarcely understood but endeavoured to try.
980dkgh498 hours. Lots of terminal lines, password entering, and stern wording later, OS X was on the SSD without me having to yell obscenities at it every time I started it up. I believe we were now actually approaching 4AM so I thought I would give it one final test and boot, calling upon any higher powers there may be for it to work. Yeah. It didn't.
Upon boot, I was greeting by a dazzlingly beautiful black screen ;-; Again, we (literally all /u/corpnewt) went through everything we could think of trying to get it work to no avail. Defeat loomed, the absolute darkness of failure approached...
I have no idea what possessed me, but I tried turning my main monitor off (display port) and relying solely on my - at the time - inferior HDMI monitor to boot. Wha? This worked. And my display port monitor worked as well. Wtf? Temperamental much OS X?
I still have to wait until the sign-in screen to switch on one of my monitors (they are both the same now but the other is through DVI), but I suppose that is probably one of the most first world applicable problems that has ever existed, so I'm not particularly fussed.
And all was well. It all worked - the goal which had escaped my grasp all but a year ago was now a reality...until the next release of OS X. I still have yet to put Windows back on my other SSD, I'm essentially putting it off partially through fear and partially though lack of time as I have final exams coming up imminently.
tl;dr - I literally didn't sleep one night in April because of an SSD's misbehaviour with OS X. /u/corpnewt is also an amazingly gracious human being who gave up 7+ hours of his time to help a lowly greenhorn he met on Reddit. I'm just thankful for the fact that I live in the UK, meaning he didn't have to forgo an entire night of sleep for the sake of a random stranger. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that he gave up his entire evening to assist me, and I find that sort of kindness frankly baffling. Thank you so much!
Picture of le setup now (sorry for the utterly shite quality; having a desk facing a window is really hard to get any sort of decent picture of, and getting it all in is also difficult when it's over 1.5 metres long :P) : http://ift.tt/1NqLnSv
Specs: i7 4770k Asus Sabertooth Z87 EVGA GTX 780ti Classified Samsung 840 Evo 8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum
Anyone who gets the obscure references in my post gets a virtual pat on the back ;)
[link] [comments]
Post a Comment