This morning, as Vicki was about to leave for work, she dumped her laptop on me, saying it wasn’t booting. It was stuck on a blue boot screen, with nothing much happening. So I did a three finger salute and forced a reboot, and it went to the OpenDarwin login prompt. I put in her userid and password, and it said “Invalid login” and started doing a normal graphical boot. Then it popped up a warning about something wrong with the Tablet driver (which is odd, because we don’t have a Tablet). I acknowledged the warning, and it booted some more, and then it went back to the OpenDarwin login prompt. After a few attempts at different userids and passwords, I remembered how to boot these guys into single user mode (splat+s).
In single user mode, it gave me an error with replaying the journal. So I did an “fsck -fy”, and after it said it finished fixing everything, it sort of hung again. So I did another boot into single user mode and another “fsck -fy” and it didn’t find anything wrong, so I booted it normally and it came up fine.
So I pulled out the external firewire drive and copied her entire /Users/vjrnts directory over to it. Good thing it’s still under AppleCare.