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entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones ([personal profile] rone) wrote2006-04-05 02:59 pm
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the honeymoon is over, the new car smell has faded

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.

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[identity profile] haineux.livejournal.com 2006-04-06 12:29 am (UTC)(link)
Let me just say this long, extremely shameful, Apple confession:

• "Repair Permissions" used to not be voodoo, shamefully enough. Even these days, for reasons I have yet to understand, sometimes the permissions on the folder into which Software Update downloads stuff get pooched, and therefore Software Update fails to download updates. Sometimes it does download updates and decide they cannot be checksum-verified.

I am pretty sure that this problem is all fixed these days, but I've said that before.

Also:
• "Verify Disk" should always be voodoo in 10.4 or later. You should never see any errors whatsoever. But if you do see an error, it means the following:

SHUTDOWN NOW, START UP FROM DIFFERENT DRIVE, and RECOVER YOUR DATA IMMEDIATELY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING STILL READING THIS? GIT!

[identity profile] haineux.livejournal.com 2006-04-06 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
While I am at it, let me add the OTHER condition that can come up. In addition to the lower-level disk structure, which fsck and Verify Disk deal with, and the high-level permissions that "Repair Permissions" deals with, there's potentially problems that happen with the directory structure. fsck and "Verify Disk" are supposed to deal with this, but sometimes their repair-fu is not powerful enough.

For this case, I strongly recommend Disk Warrior, from Alsoft. You can make a bootable CD which you can then run, and it will do a huge amount of detective work and testing to determine what the directory structure SHOULD be, and then allow you to replace it in a failsafe manner. (Even it occasionally hangs or fails, though.)

This can save your butt. Rarely, but it's cheaper than recreating data for angry clients.
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