Disaster Recovery

Last week my MacBook Pro would not boot. This happened after a less-than-graceful shutdown. Rebooting would get as far as the gray screen with the “spinning wheel” but even after waiting a long time it didn’t appear to make any progress. Rebooting while holding down the option key showed a Macintosh OS partition on the drive but it wouldn’t boot. I attached my backup drive (thank you SuperDuper!) and was able to boot from that. But the internal drive would not mount and Disk Utility wasn’t able to repair it. I then tried booting into single user mode (hold down Command-S while booting). The OS partition was there and the contents appeared to be fine. Okay, the drive is fine, there must be a file system problem. Following directions found here, I ran fsck in single-user mode. It fixed the file system, I rebooted and the MBP was fine again. Phew!