the honeymoon is over, the new car smell has faded

[rone]

My Mac experience has quickly turned to shit.

• The M$ Office updater downloaded a huge update and then failed to install it.  I tried again and the result was the same.  Also, the file was nowhere to be found.  I ended up downloading and installing it manually.
• The OS X 10.4.6 update downloaded and failed about a quarter through the installation.  The file was nowhere to be found even though the failure message claimed i could locate it in the Finder.  I tried the updater again and now it hangs during "Checking for updates...", with the progress bar about 25% full.  I downloaded the update manually, but when it says "Select a volume for installation", my hard drive never appears.  It's just blank.
• I downloaded and installed the latest iPod update.  After a reboot, iTunes ran fine.  After another reboot, iTunes crashed when i ran it, and when i reopened it, it ate my library.

Needless to say, none of this ever happened to me on Windows.  So if any of you Macheads have any tips for dealing with getting the OS update to work, that would be swell.

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Well, that sucks.

No idea what is specifically causing the problem (although I'll bet you anything that the iTunes problem is a side-effect of the botched 10.4.6 update), but I can at least make some suggestions for finding out:

In the "Utilities" folder, there's a "Console" app. Open it up: hey look, syslog!

You might want to try running the combo app installer from the command line, and see if it's spitting out any useful diagnostics there while it's failing to see your hard drive. OSX application bundles are represented by icons in the finder, but are actually just directories when you look at them in the shell: the actual executable will be under DIRNAME/Contents/MacOS/.

Last but not least, you could try re-installing the 10.4.5 combo update, but that's serious voodoo/make-backups-first territory.

And of course, you can try contacting apple support. :)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

This is what i found in the console and app logs:

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _GPTuuidType2Human
Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Resources/DiskManagementTool
Expected in: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/MediaKit

dyld: Symbol not found: _GPTuuidType2Human
Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Resources/DiskManagementTool
Expected in: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MediaKit.framework/Versions/A/MediaKit

Someone suggested running the disk utility from the command line while in single-user mode, but that yields the same errors. I'll try running the combo installer from the command line when i reboot into multi-user mode. How do you extract a .dmg file from the command line, anyway?

I really don't want to contact Apple Support because i'm afraid it's going to be a huge disaster and it'll just make me pissier.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Hm. The binding error might be completely unrelated...or it might be a symptom of the original failed install. Probably the latter -- the new version of Disk Management Tool probably got installed and then the update failed before all of its dependencies were updated. Ugh. Is that error from running the disk utility, or the combo updater?

I'll try running the combo installer from the command line when i reboot into multi-user mode.

Hey, are you running any InputManager or APE hacks? If so, you might want to disable extensions before booting up the next time. Hold down the left shift key after the system boot chime. (This is the part where voodoo systems administration meets voodoo systems design: APE hacks actually patch the in-memory state of a running application, so it's simply impossible to know what the little fuckers are doing.)

How do you extract a .dmg file from the command line, anyway?

"open filename.dmg" might well do it automagically. Otherwise, um... "man mount" and vaya con dios.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Corrupted font caches. Almost always, they only corrupt when you're using Office or Quark Xpress a lot. They screw with many things besides the applications that broke them. This is part of what makes the Mac unique.

Read this for diagnosis, description, and solution:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313535

Alternately, you can pay $50 for shareware to type 'rm -r ~/foo/fontcache' when you tell it to:
http://www.insidersoftware.com/SM_fix.php

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Apparently you are not a Type 2 Human.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

So is there something like strace or truss on OS X? This repairPermissions thing has been "running" for about an hour and i suspect it's just hosed.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

/Applications/Utilities/Activity Viewer.app is really good.

There's top on the command line, too, which is less so.

From the command line, you can sample a process, but chances are that's meaningless to you.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

AV's cute, but it's quite a memory hog...

[haineux.livejournal.com]

It's a pig because it has a lot of GUI crap, but also because it has a LOT of features built in. Double-click on a process to find out a lot about it. Pretty fancy.

Also, it's a processor pig, but that's hardly a surprise.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

man ktrace
(and kdump)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Duh, you mean like in FreeBSD? Man, it's just been too long...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Exactly like FreeBSD -- Darwin's userland toolset is a direct port of FreeBSD 5.0 to the Mach/XNU/hagluagh kernel.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the first sign of discord was when i tried installing Virtual PC and it bailed out of the installation process about 20% in (again, with an unspecified "error"). Maybe that's what broke it all.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

Yes. That is probably what hosed it. Did you bother to check to see if Virtual PC is even supposed to work on your Mac? You may be forced to nuke and pave.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, it says it wants OS X 10.2.8-10.3, but i'm on 10.4. I felt it reasonable to assume that'd be fine. I know it won't work on an Intel Mac, but this is a G4.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

"I felt it reasonable to assume that'd be fine."

A little Googling suggests that versions of Virtual PC prior to 7.0.2 did not support Tiger.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

You strictly need VPC 7.0.2 or later for 10.4.1 or later.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/misc/vpc7_0_2.xml&secid=100&ssid=3&flgnosysreq=True

Microsoft soft-pedals this in their own documentation where they can be bothered to mention it at all, so I blame them. I don't remember Connectix being this mealy-mouthed about upgrade requirements before Microsoft assimilated them.