Disk Test

Sometimes, specially when experimenting with stuff on your HP Mini MacBook Pro 311, you get a KP (kernel panic) during boot.

While you can always just opt to force shutdown the Mini 311 and restart again in verbose mode or safe mode, it causes issues with the Mac OS X file system, i.e. orphaned files. Permissions Repair via Onyx or Disk Utility can easily solve the problem and regularly running this maintenance activity can save you from a big headache.


But there's another maintenance task that I recommend you to do once in a while: Disk Test from BIOS.

Just hold F10 as you boot up your HP Mini 311. But obviously I've to get back with this post to verify the exact tab and option in the Insyde BIOS.

One night, I was preparing slides for my MA class and the fancy just hit me; I decided to play with different SMC (system versions) on my HP Mini 311 which rapidly transposed itself to documenting which FSB values yielded which clockspeed - overclocking. I was I think trying to get precisely 1.86 GHz (I've already forgotten what FSB combination it was) and OS X would hang during boot. I forced the machine to shutdown and after the consecutive KP's, OS X just wouldn't boot anymore.

But, fortunately, after my minute or two of sweating over the dilemma a bit (I was thinking whether a fresh reinstall or re-imaging via Carbon Copy Cloner was to be my destiny that night), I tried booting with Safe Mode or -x again. It now booted up, thankfully.

I then proceeded with Permissions Repair and to top it off, ran Disk Test from the HP Insyde BIOS that weekend. I haven't bothered to run that test ever since I got my HP Mini 311. It takes really long to complete so maybe that was why I, having a very low emotional quotient, hadn't bothered to run it 'till weekend. So while I slept, I let the test run at night.

While even I haven't drawn up the direct correlation of this test with what I just experienced Kernel Panics and the Mac OS X file system, I just thought I'd share this with everyone. After all, one can never be too careful.