This is really getting old - computer crashing

[Spiff]

So I am running El Cap. There was an updtate for Pixelator and RAW camera support. I updated. The computer choked and hung up on a black screen with an outlined cursor in the upper left hand screen. Never a good situation in my book. After about 5 mintues, I said nuts to this and shut it down with a hard reset.

Well, the computer did not like that at all! It was slow to restart and needed three restarts to actually get to my finder. After that, I came to the rude realization that ALL of my aplications were corrupted! Not a one worked.

What?

Yup. Not a one worked. Tried to reset things, but not helpful. I am currently restoring from a backup with CCC. It should be a simple thing to restore from backup and I am on my way again.

HOWEVER! I have this sinking feeling that my parallels and bootcamp setup is FUBAR'd again. And that I will have to rebuild that part of my setup. Again. I hope and pray that I am wrong and that somehow things will work the way they should. But why should they? I have NEVER had a backup plan (SuperDuper, CCC, Time Machine, migrate from old machine to new) that actually worked. I have always had to rebuild from the ground up. It wasn't so bad in OS9. I had that puppy down to about an hour rebuild. This? Takes me several days and a lot of headache and overtime. I am now typing from my iPad 2 as the backup progresses. Slowly. 'Cause there is no USB 3 on this machine (2011 imac). If I'm wrong about that, I'm gonna kick myself (using a USB hub right now).

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the Apple event!

[hal]

I've never seen a crash like that - hope you get it all restored

[DP]

I've crashed three times with EC. Just froze, no KP... Hard restart and back to normal. Still, haven't crashed like that since OS9.

[JoeBob]

Good luck, buddy.
I know you don't have much time for this foolishness right now.

[Onamuji]

Those symptoms point to a drive that's on its last legs.

Boot from an external and run a SMART check with SMART Utility.

[Spiff]

Apple's disk utility seems to check out fine every time.

[Onamuji]

Spiff wrote:
Apple's disk utility seems to check out fine every time.

The only occasion where Apple's Disk Utility will indicate a drive's hardware-failure is after the drive is already dead and gone.

Run a SMART check.

[Spiff]

Oh, by the way, I think I have to thank the admins for cleaning up my post. Sorry about my profanity, just frustrated. I appreciate the admins and what they do. lap:

And I will look into a SMART scan.

[Spiff]

So I looked into the SMART Utility. Got it for a free trial. In no time flat it scanned the HDD and said it passed. What's the difference running it on the boot drive vs starting from an external drive and running it on the internal drive?

[raz]

one possibility is the ribbon cable from the drive to the motherboard.

It's a common failure point on Mac laptops. IIRC, it's very fragile on the iMac as well. If you've ever replaced the internal HD ...