The dreaded disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)

I've had my macbook for nearly five months and use it as my primary dev box. Last month I took it with me to Sweden to run some OSGi tutorials - before the very first session I calmly closed the lid, wandered over to the conference room and opened it up to see... nothing!

People were already wandering in so decided to do a quick reboot - but instead of the reassuring apple logo I now saw a flashing question mark folder (gulp). Luckily the tutorial was available on the intranet (FYI, it's based on Pax Construct) so I was able to grab a spare laptop and continue.

Anyway after the tutorial session I absentmindedly turned on my macbook, which now started ok!

So is this a new mac feature, auto-repair? Sadly not... since then its behaviour has been erratic - occasional beach-balls, looking like the system had frozen only to return after a few minutes. Tried turning off spotlight indexing (nice performance boost) which helped for a bit but the problem returned. Tried a full archive, erase and re-install with minimum setup which I thought had nailed it, but this weekend my macbook went totally rosak :(

No hard disk, nothing... nowhere to reinstall MacOSX, no chance of recovering data - thankfully I still had the full image backup from a few days ago (plus most of my work is online these days).

So my macbook is now at the local Apple support centre and I'm back to using my trusty Linux box that I built from scratch (and ironically contains a still-working HDD I rescued from an ancient Dell laptop and now use for temporary storage).

So here's the MOTD... if you see any errors like the following in your system log:

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)

make sure you have any critical data backed up and get your macbook checked out asap.