OSX Freezes, Pinwheel of Doom, Volume Corrupted

It was a normal Friday night. I was laying in bed, trying to watch the latest episode of Happy Town on Hulu, when suddenly the video paused, the sound kept going and nothing I pressed would make the full screen go away. I tried every key combo I knew. Finally I settled for restarting. I pressed and held the power button till the screen turned off, then pressed it again expecting my trusty MacBook Pro to restart flawlessly.

Boy was I wrong. The first thing I noticed on restart was a strange loading screen that took a little longer than normal on boot. I waited, eventually got the login screen. After logging in and booting, everything was great. I started Firefox again, went to Hulu, continued where I left off. After a few minutes, the video froze. The sounds kept playing. I was right back where I started. After a bit of googling from my trusty Windows XP machine, I found that some other people had similar issues and fixed it by clearing caches and removing startup items. I thought this may just be a flash issue, or a Firefox problem. I tried all of the fixes above.

I restarted, removed startup items, ran the periodic updates, ran cleared my caches, did all of the fixes suggested. I restarted again. Now... I wanted to prove to myself that this wasn't an issue with Firefox, so I started up Safari, which I recently stopped using (see http://echodittolabs.org/blog/2010/06/safari-firefox-why-i-made-change ). I went to ESPN.com to checkout the World Cup scores. After a few minutes, Safari froze. I tried to force quit, but it was useless. I had to restart.

At this point I was ready to give up. I sent an email to some coworkers, and asked what they thought I could try. The only response I got was to start up in single user mode and see if fsck could fix it. I restarted my computer in single user mode by pressing CMD and S at the same time on startup.

I ran FSCK and nothing happened. Could not repair it said. I ran it again. fsck -fy . This time, I got a million errors. There were wrong counts of every kinda thing there could be wrong counts. I got sooo many errors, culminating in "Volume could not be repaired"

I tried FSCK a few more times, to no avail. Finally I tried mount -uw, then FSCK again. After looping through 4 or 5 times, everything was repaired and I was able to get my laptop to start. In order to test whether it would freeze again, I started this blog post. I have been able to finish, freeze free so... I am guessing it worked!

STEPS:

Restart. On startup press and hold CMD+S
Type "mount -uw"
Type "fsck -fy"
After it is repaired, type "exit" and hopefully you will be as lucky as me.