Camera Troubles Fixed!

 On Sept 21st, I used a program called MacKeeper.  It cleans, defrags, and checks for viruses, but the main feature I was interested in was finding duplicate files, foreign language options, and leftover bits of deleted programs.  It found quite a lot of them.  Of course, it doesn't just go and delete them.  You have to check of a box for each file.  I examined the first dozen or so carefully and it seemed accurate, so I just started checking all the boxes of files it offerred and clicking submit.

Apparently, it moved seamlessly in my applications folder, and none of the names I saw at first seemed relevant to me (seeming like leftover bits of deleted programs) and I continued checking boxes and deleting them.  On one page, after I hit delete but before the screen cleared, I saw one was iPhoto (an Apple program for processing camera pictures).  I realized it was deleting programs and stopped.

Well, I went to my backup program, Time Machine, but I couldn't restore the program.  Actually, I couldn't get it to work at all on even small test files.  After messing around with that for a couple of days, I reread the instructions an discovered I was doing part of it exactly backwards.

So I restored iPhoto.  It was back in my applications folder, but I still couldn't upload pictures from the camera.  It worked for looking at old pictures and other functions, just wouldn't upload new ones, saying "camera not found".  I tried everything for another couple of days, until I noticed it was an old version of iPhoto.

So I went to the Apple store online to upgrade it.  Can't do that.  The old version was TOO old.  OK, I bought the new version.  That didn't work either!  I tried restoring the camera software.  That didn't solve the problem.  I went to the Canon site and downloaded the camera drivers and software.  That didn't solve the problem either.

I was (correctly) positive it wasn't the cameras.  Too unlikely both would good bad at the same time, and I had used a new cable AND tried different ports in the computer.

I gave up and got on live chat with Apple.  After 2 hours, the problem remained.  The technician said there were some more complicated things to try but I would have to call the Apple store in the morning because there were some things he could not access (it was late night).  So, I scheduled a call from Apple for 1 PM Thursday.  At 2 PM Thursday with no call, I went grocery shopping.  Naturally, I discovered they had called 5 minutes after I left.  They sent me an email saying I could reschedule online or just call a number.

I called the number Saturday and had a tech on the phone in 2 minutes.  We spent a merry 30 minutes searching various screens and programs until one said "camera device present", whereupon he said "Aha, you've lost a piece of your operating system"!  Somewhere apparently (a partition on the hard drive I surmise) hidden and protected, is a copy of the operating system.  It took a few minutes to navigate there, and then it said 50 minutes to restore, so the tech gave me a direct number to him in case it didn't work, and I hung up.

It worked!

I'll be a LOT more careful with MacKeeper in the future.  And I'm going to have to study Time Machine preferences/options because for some reason, the only application program it backed up since Jan 2012 was iTunes!