We made up for yesterday’s non-walk by doing the full 10K Year-Round Event in Los Gatos this morning. The route had changed in the two decades since the last time we did it – the second half of the route went along the Los Gatos Creek Trail instead of going through the residential areas west of Santa Cruz Avenue, so it was a good thing we took a map instead of relying on memory.

I didn’t get around to labeling and recabling the Mac mini, but I did ship its failed hard drive back to Western Digital for replacement. I wanted to erase it before shipping, but it was going to take the better part of a day to do so, so I settled for reformatting it as exFAT and writing junk to it, then re-reformating it as APFS. If I’d had an OS/2 machine around, I would have formatted it as HPFS and really confused anyone trying to extract data from it!

This evening, Diane and I split an experimental seasonal beer that we’d bought from Trader Joe’s. I finished my half; she gave up after a couple of sips, and I didn’t find it necessary to finish hers. It wasn’t unpleasant – in fact, it tasted quite a lot like a peppermint patty – but I’d rather have a beer that tastes like beer or a candy that tastes like candy than a combination of the two.

We’d planned to take a walk with the Striders this afternoon, but it was pouring down rain when the time came to leave our nice warm house – and even though we had the proper clothing, we didn’t have the proper attitude and stayed home.

I decided that it’d be a good idea to use that time to keep working on photos, but when I sat down at the computer (an M1 Mac mini) and started typing, nothing happened. I tried to log in remotely and failed at that, so I held the power button down to force a restart.

No chime. Nothing on the screen. But the white light was on at the front of the machine, so I knew it had power.

I tried a few times without success; I couldn’t get the computer to boot to the recovery system, either. It was time for a web search, which brought me to r/applehelp – and that took me to Apple’s instructions on reviving a Mac with Apple Silicon.

I had to install the Apple Configurator on my laptop (luckily, I have multiple machines!), and then I followed the instructions – it took several tries to get the Configurator to see the mini, but eventually, I got there and started the “revive”. Half an hour later, I got an error message: “The System cannot be restored on this device. The device is not connected.” And sure enough, it had vanished from the Configurator.

It was time for professional help – Apple’s chat support person set up a phone call with a tech, who very patiently worked with me to figure out what was happening. The first step was to disconnect everything I didn’t need from the computer and try to boot it – and it worked, though I had problems with the wireless keyboard and trackpad. I found a wired keyboard and mouse and kept going – she had me reconnect devices one at a time and reboot – more than an hour later, we found the culprit: my Time Machine drive, a Western Digital 4TB My Passport.

It probably would have taken less time to find the problem if my cabling were better organized and better labeled – I found cables which were plugged into the computer or the hub or the monitor which had nothing attached to the other end! Cleaning up the cables and labeling them is a project for tomorrow. As is returning the bad drive to Western Digital for replacement under warranty.

Maybe having backups is overrated.