{"id":16474,"date":"2018-09-27T00:33:10","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T14:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=16474"},"modified":"2018-09-28T07:29:38","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T14:29:38","slug":"tale-of-two-macbooks-steve-davidson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/tale-of-two-macbooks-steve-davidson\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two MacBooks – by Steve Davidson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Steve Davidson<\/h3>\n

\"FrankenIt was the worst of times, it is the best of times<\/p>\n

In early April, my well cared-for mid-2010 15\u201d MacBook Pro began to fail badly: frequent crashes (kernel panic linked to the GPU), the internal fans made a grinding\/groaning sound, and my backups started reporting errors. This MBP, my only computer, had served me with honor for over seven (almost eight) years, and got a new lease on life three years prior when I replaced the HDD with a SSD. As I reported to the Nosillacast Google+ community: <\/a><\/p>\n

I tend to keep things that work well for me around for many years (for example, my primary vehicle a 1994 Honda Accord, which still gets 28mpg) \u2014 I like to buy with an eye for the future \u2014 and I would be very unhappy if I bought a new MBP just ahead of a big advance or new feature set that that might be announced at Apple\u2019s World Wide Developers Conference that was less than two months away. So I asked the Castaways, \u201cIs this a good time to buy?\u201d<\/p>\n

The feedback was great, and if I thought I could hold out for a while longer, I would have. Then +George Fromtulsa mentioned that he saw refurbished Mac minis available for a decent price on Apple\u2019s site. I decided (after three crashes the next day) that I could not hold out for two months, plus the idea of having a small spare computer was appealing (more on this later), so I bought the refurbished 2014 Mini.<\/p>\n

I never done a \u201cnuke and pave\u201d (as Allison calls them) \u2014 ever. Going back to dawn of MacOS X, I have used the Migration Assistant (or its predecessors) to transition to every new Mac I have owned. My long-term plan was to start fresh (with a \u201cnuke and pave\u201d) with my eventual new MacBook Pro while having the old one, side-by-side to act as a template.<\/p>\n

Since that was not to be, I wanted to minimize the changes with the Mini by booting my near-death MBP in Target Disk Mode (so it acts like an external drive, opting to perform the SSD extraction surgery later if needed) and having the Mini boot and run exclusively form the corpse of the MBP by feeding one of the Thunderbolt ports via Firewire 800 through an adapter.<\/p>\n

Since the use of the Mini was a temporary arrangement, I didn\u2019t want to invest in a lot of new equipment, so I used a keyboard from my father\u2019s long-retired Strawberry iMac (ca. 1999), an an old Super Mouse (the one with the tiny trackball), and I connected the HDMI output of the Mini to a small TV (using the stand my MPB used to occupy \u2014 see image). It was an odd mixture of semi-new, old, and really old.<\/p>\n

It all seemed like a good idea at the time.<\/p>\n

Then the \u201cFranken-Mini\u201d began to freeze when under heavy load. I suspected that the freezes were due to the logic board issues on the MBP (impacting Target Disk Mode), so I performed the surgery and extracted the SSD from the MPB, and popped it in my \u201cdrive toaster\u201d (a NewerTech Voyager-Q) which I connected to the Mini via USB 3. It was noticeably faster after that.<\/p>\n

My enthusiasm was not sustained.<\/p>\n

I left it running overnight and the next morning I discovered it had shut down (the system log abruptly terminated around 3am, with no obvious cause). The next day, when I was moving some larger files the machine froze again (mouse pointer didn\u2019t move, clock didn\u2019t increment, unresponsive to keyboard input, etc.).<\/p>\n

After a bit of debugging and \u201clog archeology\u201d I determined that some kind of bus contention or bus lock-up was the cause of the freezes. I tried different USB ports (there are four to choose from), but that made no difference.<\/p>\n

So, continuing to reduce the number of uncontrolled variables, I decided to eliminate the external drive, and used Apple\u2019s Migration Assistant to move the contents of the now bare SDD to the Mac Mini\u2019s internal HDD \u2014 following Apple\u2019s procedure for doing so.<\/p>\n

Afterward, the Mini was painfully slow \u2014 I mean like launch Safari, go get a cup of coffee, return, go back for cream, and maybe Safari\u2019s Dock icon would have stoped bouncing and the application would be running by then. After much more fruitless debugging and \u201clog archeology,\u201d and I finally came to the conclusion that there was something beyond repair on the MBP\u2019s SSD that I would I would not be able to find it without spending a lot more time searching \u2014 it was time to cut my losses, time to bite the bullet.<\/p>\n

But would I really do a \u201cnuke and pave?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not quite. Instead, I decided to do a clean install of the macOS and applications, but I would use the Migration Assistant to move my user accounts to the new Mini (this was especially important because I wanted to preserve decades worth of carefully-crafted application settings and preferences).<\/p>\n

So, using OneNote (my go-to replacement for Evernote), I created a checklist of applications that will have a place on the new machine, and binned them in four categories:<\/p>\n