and you thought your rebooting was a pain 

this is process for rebooting the mac mini at my apt:

  1. power on
  2. enter username and password
  3. you will get between 0 and 4 warnings about hard drives being corrupt (long story), just hit ‘Ignore’ for now.
  4. your screen will suddenly switch from normal to all messed up. to fix it back, click offscreen to the right and up and find the pull down menu option to switch to 1244×768 resolution. long story.
  5. next, networking. the built in wireless doesn’t work (long story) so it uses a usb wireless. the one that this mac has is not mac compatible (long story) so it uses spoofed windows drivers. run USBWirelessUtility to connect. in case it ate it’s configuration, you might need to re-enter WPA2 key.
  6. networking part 2: since the computer shares network to the xbox you will need to put in custom command line routing rules (long story). first do “killall nadt” and wait about a minute (long story). after “ps -au | grep nadt” shows it died, run “./nads”.
  7. next, storage. there are four usb drives which all have full disk encryption. start Disk Utility and count the devices. they sometimes don’t come up correctly (long story) so if one doesn’t show up, figure out which one it is by disk size and power cycle it until it shows up.
  8. now open TrueCrypt and arrange the drives in correct order by size (‘Restore Favorites’ won’t work, long story) and mount them one by one using each of their unique passwords (all 30ish characters) which when entered together in the right order make a verse from a polish song from the 90s.

and you’re done. if you’re feeling proactive you can reestablish smb connections to other machines, verify dropbox and simplifymedia are running correctly, and check for patches. if there are patches, cross your fingers that they won’t require a reboot.