Close Call

June 23rd, 2007
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Disaster has been avoided. I am writing this from my iMac. Can’t tell you how relieved I am. And before you ask, backups are already in progress. ;-) Lesson learned.

Victory!

Now I too can join the “I Survived the Upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4.10″ club. All the thanks and credit goes to Igor Minar (who passes credit to Mike Brooks). You guys saved my butt big time. For those who want to duplicate the fix, here’s what I did, following Igor’s instructions.

1 – Download a chip architecture appropriate copy of the DMG for the standalone combination update for 10.4.10 from Apple. (Intel / Power PC) Put it on a USB key (if you use PPC, make sure you have a properly formatted key, otherwise, you’re all set). Plug said USB key into your Mac and proceed to step 2.

2 – Boot from your Mac OS X Installation Disc. (NOT an update disc.) Choose which language you’d like to use, but once the menu bar at the top appears, don’t do anything else with the installer. Choose Utilities, then Disk Utility. Repair the disk permissions and the disk if necessary and even if it’s just “voodoo.” Close Disk Utility.

3 – Copy the DMG from the USB key to your computer’s hard drive. (I’m using the Intel DMG, since that’s what I really used. PPC people just change the name.) Go to the Utilities menu, and choose Terminal this time. Enter the code below and hit enter after each line.

cp “/Volumes/USBKEYNAME/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.10Intel.dmg” \
“/Volumes/YOURMACHDD/”

4 – Mount the DMG file. Hit enter after each line.

hdiutil attach \
“/Volumes/YOURMACHDD/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.10Intel.dmg”

5 – Run the update. Hit enter after each line (4 times total).

“/Volumes/YOURMACHDD/usr/bin/open” \
/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app \
“/Volumes/Mac OS X 10.4.10 Combined Update (Intel)/\
MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.10Intel.pkg”

6 – Follow the instructions on the GUI that popped up, restart when prompted, reclaim your machine, and THANK IGOR and the others who got this fix out there!

Whew. Glad that’s over. Now for laundry and apartment cleaning. Fun. (Actually, relatively speaking, yeah…it is.) :-D

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  • David...that sucks. If I were you I'd attempt to navigate to some MP3 files or similar trash-able stuff and delete it to make space. Otherwise I have no idea what to tell you. Good luck, man. Sorry it took me so long to reply - my computer's in the shop AGAIN. :-( Let us know how it goes.
  • Here's a dilly of a pickle: I've successfully followed the instructions as you've written them above, gotten to the point of installing the update but come to find out the Macbook in question doesn't have enough space on the hard drive (I'm 17mb short).

    Good lord what do I do now? Help?
  • I feel confident saying that the multiple programs and peripherals in use at the time of update played a large role... Yeah. In self-defense, I didn't realize it was a system update. I thought I'd just authorized download of the updates for iTunes, etc. Surprise. Heh. Yeah.

    It should be noted, however, that this can happen to anyone regardless of precautions that you take. The flaw zeros out files on your HDD - so sometimes it'll booger up individual programs and sometimes it'll prevent you from booting. Prebinding. Gotta love it.
  • I just finished the update with no problems. I have a MacBook. I wonder what caused your problem.
  • Nope - I retained absolutely everything. Fixed the problem, lost nothing. The absolute best possible outcome. :-) I am, however, backing things up like a maniac now.
  • so, were your files erased by the installation disk?
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