mac os x snow leopard crash

It has been about 7 days since I upgraded from Leopard os x 10.5 to Snow Leopard os x 10.6 and everything had been working well – actually, think working a bit faster.  This morning, while surfing the net with Chrome, my macbook pro hung up…after 3 mins, I shut off the power.  Restarted and the spinning wheel kept spinning.  Pulled out my netbook and did a search on the crash and went through the steps of restarting and this time holding the ’shift’ key (until you see the Apple logo) to go into ’safe boot’ mode.  No luck.

Got my 10.6 install dvd, and this time restarted holding the ‘c’ key (until you see the Apple logo) and selected ‘English’ as the language and went to the ‘Utilities’ menu and ran ‘disk utility’ which indicated that all was ok.  I had done a full backup prior to upgrading to 10.6 using SuperDuper and attached that USB disk to the computer and rebooted to that USB disk with no issues.  Was able to see my macbook pro drive and access the data, copy over the data to a third firewire attached drive.

Called and opened a support incident w Apple. I asked the tech support person (Aaron) as to how I could see the error/system logs (to figure out what caused the crash so that we could fix the root of the problem) and he informed me that we could see the logs only upon booting from the macbook pro as opposed to my booting from the backed up drive and navigating to the macbook pros’s drive.  He reported no known issues in their database, verified through running ‘disk utility’ that the hardware was fine and asked me to reinstall the os which I did (took about 50 mins).  It is a non-destructive install so I did not have to reinstall my applications/data.

On my prior macbook, the only issue I had was the superdrive failing which Apple replaced.  This is the first time in using a mac product in 3.5 years that I have experienced an os crash..

I downloaded hp4780 print drivers yesterday from hp site (149 mb) and added Chrome extension for pdf/doc viewer…

I finished downloading the 923mb updates following the reinstall and will now call Apple support so that I can review the logs…

Ok, so called Apple support and level 1 support person (Scott) referred me to level 2/Senior support person (Janet) who said that since I had reinstalled the os, the prior logs could no longer be viewed!  So, system is up and running again and concern looms that it may crash again.

I asked the Senior support person if I could get a listing of what a default installation should look like in terms of the folder structure so that I could verify that my folders were correctly structured/ordered (having upgraded from a prior os version) and was concerned to be informed that they did not have a document that showed that information (or perhaps, did not have access to).  I was pointed to a 3rd party site called Zen virtual applications which could possibly have that information.  Zen did not…

Overall, I would rate the support as less than ideal – given that this is Apple and that they take pride in advertising the ‘genius’ concept of support.  Shalom!