Problems with my Mac Laptop

Yesterday I went to turn on my Mac laptop computer and it wouldn't boot correctly. I have an encrypted hard drive in the event that someone steals my computer. When I turn on the machine, it asks for my password. I was making it that far and it was even working enough to know if the password entered was correct or not. After a few seconds, it would bring the login screen back up but not allow any input from the mouse or keyboard.

My hope was that once I got the laptop back to my office and on the network, the problem would fix itself. My flight from Salt Lake to the Bay Area was plenty early and I was in the office at 8:30 giving my hypothesis a try. Unfortunately it didn't work. Next was a call to our IT department. They asked if I had tried resetting the NVRAM and I had. There wasn't anything they could help me with over the phone and so I brought it to our IT department's walk-in office. Most of the company uses Windows laptops and I am one of the few with a Mac. That means I had to make another trip with the laptop to another office where the Mac specialists reside. I dropped the computer off and headed to a meeting.

It was a distraction to be without my computer and very difficult to concentrate during my meeting so I was very happy to get a call from the IT department telling me they figured out what was wrong with my Mac. It seems that the hard drive had somehow had permissions changed. They had to boot my laptop from another hard disk, change the permissions on my drive, and all was fixed. Unfortunately I wasn't there to watch how they did it so I can't give step-by-step instructions. It was a great relief to have everything fixed though and they didn't have to reinstall anything. Naturally the first thing I did when I got back to my office was to take a backup of the computer. Now should something go wrong again, I don't have to worry if they have to erase my hard drive to fix it. I have a backup. I should probably do that with all of my computers now. Furthermore, I should probably take backups on a regular basis. OS X includes Time Machine which is perfect for such a task and I plan to take advantage of it from now on.