boot camp
for those mac users among you, i have a few gentle words of advice:
yesterday i foolishly capitulated to the sweet nothings whispered by software update and agreed that, yes, it could have its way with my young and innocent emac.
big mistake.
as the update downloaded, i went for a shower. when i returned, the screen had gone black. strange...and nothing would wake it up. so i did a forced restart. the graphite apple appeared, and then the whirling circle of progress...and then nothing.
forced restart again. graphite apple. whirly...whirly...whirly...ad infinitum.
repeat several million times. still nothing.
i tried a variety of boring things to get the machine to boot completely. theoretically, because my system was up to 10.2, i should have been able to boot from the system discs that came with the machine, do an archive-and-install, and have a clean copy of 10.2 back in business. but my machine came with bootable discs for 10.1 and un-bootable discs for the jaguar upgrade...so no dice.
so, okay, tried a greater variety of boring things. (i will not enumerate them here because it makes me cranky just remembering.) eventually i ended up in single-user mode, fsck-ing all the livelong day as instructed by the nice people on the apple discussion forums. i do not exaggerate when i tell you that i spent three hours typing that command, waiting for it to repair errors, and then typing it again in an infinite loop of boredom and rage. it kept finding errors to fix. all i can assume is that 10.2.8 hosed my machine but good.
finally, bored with fsck-ing, i considered my options. i could buy the bootable 10.2 discs for around $120 — but why would i do that with panther coming out? i could continue fsck-ing for the next three days, probably to no avail. or i could entrust my beleaguered emac to the tender mercies of the nice people at smalldog — they could do a clean system reinstall for about $65.
i was buckled into the driver's seat faster than you can say, "why on earth should apple's buggy upgrade cost me money to fix?!" we drove out to smalldog, dropped off the machine, and should be able to pick it up in a few days.
from what i've read — and that's been a lot — 10.2.8 is causing a wide range of problems, from zapping people's printer settings (a minor glitch that's easily fixed) to, well, rendering the computer unbootable. but many people are having no trouble at all with the upgrade. there seems to be little rhyme or reason to it. so if you're a mac user and feeling lucky, go for it (after you've done a thorough backup and made sure you have bootable system discs). but i really wouldn't recommend it.
Comments
Ow. I feel your pain. FWIW, all three machines here took 10.2.8 with no trouble, but I held off for a few days to see what the oracle had to say.
Posted by: paul^2 | October 9, 2003 08:59 AM