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Apple 10.4.11 Update Can Brick Macs With Boot Camp
g-san writes "Some Mac users are having problems with the latest 10.4.11 update, yours truly included. The problem seems to be caused by the presence of a Boot Camp partition and renders the Mac unable to reboot after the update fails. Note the Geniuses at the Apple stores are recommending a full disk wipe; but data can be recovered via Firewire." MacNN has a note up that if you fall victim to this "known issue" and need to reformat the disk, you can't reinstall Boot Camp because it is no longer available to OS X 10.4 Tiger users.
"They just _work_."
We have four or five people in a thread and it's news? Please. In addition, this is NOT A BRICKING. Bricking means it's completely inoperable. If you can reinstall, it's not bricked. Period. I also find it hard to believe that you can't archive & install if something goes wrong, or at least do the plain old install.
Just reached #11 on CNET UK's "Worst Consumer Tech" list ;)
*ducks*
The term "brick" is being bandied about pretty loosely these days. It does not mean, "I had a problem, possibly even one of my own creation, that can only be cured by re-installation, and that annoys me and I think I can get some blog hits by griping about it."
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
My 10.4.11 with Bootcamp froze for about five hours during the screen where the choice between your OSes comes up. It was just the grey background with neither hd icon showing. I thought everything was toast. Left for a while in despair and total frustration -- it wouldn't even go into OS X -- but it seemingly magically "worked itself out" after something like 5 hours. Strange. Anyway, installed Leopard immediately because Bootcamp was supposed to stop working when Leopard released anyway and my livelihood unfortunatley depends on using Windows every day on my machine.
If you read the original agreement when install Bootcamp without Leopard (ie the pre-Leopard versions of Bootcamp), it tells you it is Beta software only and that it will expire in October 2007. And that's what it did.
I installed Leopard anyway -- the full, non-beta Bootcamp (ie the one in Leopard release) has a bunch of additional features and drivers (such as for eject button, volume buttons, lots of little details that the beta did not -- it's much better -- I highly recommend Leopard to any heavy Windows users.
No, Boot Camp before Leopard was always Beta only. You had to agree to recognize that before installing. It was originally only going to be available with Leopard, but then they decided to offer it as a Beta that you download from Apple. It never came on any macs before Leopard. You had to go download it (for free) as beta software.
Previously only a beta version was available. When they released the final version it was included with 10.5. It would be nice if they kept the beta that worked on 10.4 available, but it is beta software and it is understandable if they don't want to deal with the support headaches. If they were shipping a real version for 10.4, then they'd have to test every new patch to OS X and see if it worked with bootcamp (which admittedly would have been nice).
So you can lose all your files during a copy, an upgrade will break your computer requiring a re-install of the OS...
...and Vista is the one we're supposed to give up on?
Microsoft and Vista a mess most people don't want to touch or deal with.
Apple and OS X becoming more and more of just another buggy OS and app vendor but with a huge markup on their prices.
Almost everyone I know want to move on to an open vendor neutral platform like Linux and yet...
* We still have to competing desktops that are only marginally different in how they fail to deliver a commercial grade user experience
* KDE klowns are still sitting around slapping each other on the back about naming everything with the idiotic K in front and doing a poor job of cloning Windows 2000
* Gnome still has Microsoft fanboys infesting open source desktops with Microsoft patent time bombs
* Open source/Linux developers still can't seem to grasp the most basic principals of font usage, UI element spacing and alignments, colour choice, and so on and instead are pointlessly trying to 'prove they are ahead' with inane 3D accelerated desktop effects no one wants
* A million sub 1.0 apps all of which do some things right and other things wrong but no single apps that actually get things people expect from commercial desktop software. And each of those open source apps depend on a hundred million crazily named library packages that are constantly getting updated.
The computing world WANTS to jump to Linux. They've been wanting to for years. They are waiting for you open source kids to finally grow up and get your shit together.
It was Beta Software. You had to recognize this to install it. It was a free beta download. It was never part of Tiger. It was something you were given opportunity to try for free as beta software, but was originally intended to only become available with Leopard!
Please grasp this people.
When you installed it, it told you that it expired in October 2007!
Not sure what the exact symptoms are, because no one in this thread seems to have actually experienced the issue. If its an issue where you turn the computer on, and all you get is the Apple logo and spinning gear, follow these directions:
If you have access to another Mac that is still working:
1. Put the 'broken' Mac in FireWire Disk Mode (reboot while holding down "T").
2. Attach via FireWire, the HD shows up on the desktop.
3. Download the 10.4.11 Combo update and re-install it on the "broken" Mac. Make sure its the "Combo" update. Get it by searching for "10.4.11 Combo" at apple.com/support
4. Reboot the "broken" Mac, it should just work now.
If you have a bootable external drive (always good for troubleshooting and recovery!), boot the "broken" Mac to the external drive and follow the above steps from 3.
Its actually really quick and easy to fix. Hope this helps.
On that thread he says he has a 17" Macbook Pro bought 9/06, I bought my 17" iMac a month later. I was able to run Software Update from OS X 10.4.10 to 10.4.11 without incident and I also have the Boot Camp beta (1.3 to be exact). Anecdotal evidence really doesn't prove much in his case.
The thing I don't understand about his story is that he took his Macbook Pro to a Apple store genius bar and they told him his only option was a reinstall, they wouldn't tell him how to boot into target disk mode and now he's online asking how to fix this problem? Uh... I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that.
This could actually be interpreted as partly Google's fault, for raising expectations of "beta" software. Which is exactly what Boot Camp on 10.4 is: a public beta that expired quite a while ago. In particular, when the beta software also involves your boot sector and the Windows bootloader, you should consider yourself lucky to have anything recoverable. (Of course, it doesn't sound like Windows was at fault here, but nobody should be surprised when something like this breaks.)
In the case of the OP on the Apple forums, it sounds like the biggest problem was that the person had less than 1GB free space on the OS X partition. Obviously, this is only indirectly due to BootCamp, but it did stop the OP from doing an "archive and re-install" of the OS. It is interesting that one person reported that running the 10.4.11 updater under 10.5 but applied to the 10.4.10 partition works, so it isn't a completely reliable bug.
It is also worth noting that nobody has reported an actual filesystem corruption requiring a reformat, so the linked article is just plain wrong. Using the "archive and install" option to roll back the OS seems to be a reliable workaround. (With the one exception noted above.)
"The license to use Boot Camp Beta expires when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is available to the public."
"Warning: Boot Camp Beta is preview software licensed for use on a trial basis for a limited time. Do not use Boot Camp Beta in a commercial operating environment or with important data. You should back up all of your data before installing this software and regularly back up data while using the software. Your rights to use Boot Camp Beta are subject to acceptance of the terms of the software license agreement that accompanies the software."
Users of Boot Camp Beta did read the terms of use, didn't they?
And you just lost all your geek cred trying to shoot down someone who is *properly* defining what bricking really means.
Don't worry, a new UID will suit you well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, no real data loss, only a couple unfortunate users reporting it, and it's relatively easily fixable. I'm sorry, but stuff like this happens to someone with any OS patch, on any platform. Not news.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I know I'll probably be modded down for this, but...
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
Hosed not brick
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Sure, but one that only shows up if you're running expired beta software, so not really a priority for Apple.
Why doesn't Apple let Tiger users download Bootcamp? Smells like a "forced update".Umm, because it is a feature of their new OS and they want people to pay for new features. The only way this is different from all the other new features in 10.5 is that they offered a beta that worked on 10.4 and told you when you installed it that:
If someone installed an update and was still running the 10.5 beta instead of the real version and it broke something, would you complain that Apple was just trying to get money out of them by forcing them to buy the real version instead of testing and supporting the beta still?
Apple has insufficiently tested updates before and messed up and accidentally broken fixes with updates and deserve to be taken to task when that happens. They've been pretty good about getting right on the problem and issuing a new fix within a week or so. This, however, expired beta software, seems like a non-issue to me.
Microsoft, listen and learn, because Apple is doing things the right way. You've released a pretty buggy, poorly designed major revision of your OS, alright, why not, but right then you release a service pack to your previous major version of your OS to make it better. This is NOT the way to go!
In order to make your users move on to your new but inferior major revision, you need to ruin the version of your OS that everyone is using. Just look at how Apple handled it. They just released a pretty buggy major revision of their OS, but it's okay! Because to make up for it they updated the previous version that everybody was using so that computers equipped with it won't even boot anymore! This way users are more than eager to move on to the new version, despite its flaws!
Steve Jobs' genius will never cease from amazing us, nor shall you cease from learning from it.
You just got troll'd!
It's in the same location as the proof of your assertions...
I'm running the same system described in the topic of this thread, I run Boot Camp, and I haven't any problems at all.
By the way, I can boot in 17 seconds from power on to open browser. If Microsoft could do that and have zero threat of virii, I'd be running MS operating systems. Heck, if Linux could run the software I use I'd use that. Too bad it doesn't, but hey, there it is.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
And the fact it uses a BSD like kernel which is way more stable then any NT kernel, and it has true permissions that are horribly emulated in UAC of Vista, so misbehaving applications can't install tons of spyware and the like.
/. ? I'm sure if you scour the Mac forums long enough you'll run into a post where someone claims his Mac ate his cat because it was bothered by it playing with the mouse.
I'm assuming you've never even looked into the NT kernel. The original design is by far one of the best kernel designs I've ever looked at. NT was horribly crippled by Microsoft when it came to the desktop. NT has real permissions, but something else Microsoft decided to dumb down at is was shifted over to the desktop. No matter how you slice it, Mac IS more stable then windows BECAUSE the drivers are written in house. The BSD kernel is nice, but it alone doesn't make Mac inherently better then NT. I've had the kernel PANIC on a Mac before, they're not invulnerable. But I cannot think of a time which I have had either system PANIC/BSOD (Mac OSX and XP) for anything other then a third-party driver.
So back to the article... Since when are forum posts a legitimate article that should be posted on
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
So here is my saga with Apple...
.Trash. They were VERy reluctant to do this, especially when I mentioned hooking my computer up to their computer and running the program.
.Trash and run installer. I cannot get to the directory due to file permissions (no root). They refuse to turn on root (even on an external hdd-installed OS!) so I can run the update. He then tells me it is time for me to go, and they can do no more.
I had this EXACT problem happen to me last week. I was stupid enough to click "yes" install the update I trusted to not brick my computer. After it did Brick, I was fortunate to search for the answer to fix it online BEFORE going to the "genius" bar. Once I got there, I told them it was while installing the update that the problems had occurred. They did not believe me that it was "Apple's fault". They said I would have to do an archive re-install of the whole system. I said I knew another way to fix it by manually running the update. I then asked them to boot up with my computer in target mode and try to manually install the update, which should be in my home directory's
However, he had a Leopard install on an external HDD that they were willing to "try", b/c they could not hook my computer up to anything elese without it "costing me $150 to check it in to the service center, and then they would probably just do an Archive Install.'" They could boot off an external HDD w/o charging me, however, they only had Leopard on the externals, NO Tiger. So he boots up, I need a command prompt to get to the
Now, my Tiger CDs are in another country. I have no access to them, my computer is bricked. I cannot go home and fix the problem myself (otherwise, I would never have gone to the store anyway!), and I cannot reinstall. I am in town for another couple weeks, and will not be with my Tiger CDs for months! I know the answer to the problem. I ask to borrow some Tiger CD so I can try to boot to the command prompt and update, or reinstall. They refuse. But for "$150, I can check it in and they will do an archive reinstall."
So I ask if they can just boot my computer on a Tiger CD so I can get a terminal and run the update. It won't take 5 minutes I say! He agrees to do "this one last thing, but then that is it, and I have to go."
He finally does it, I get a command prompt. I manually run Installer, choose my HDD, it updates, all works.
Point being? Apple "genius bar" is more like the "apple, don't have a clue bar." If I wouldn't have know the answer BEFORE I went there, and had the technical know-how and the guts for force them to let me do it, I would have walked out with a new "archive install" and $150 less in my wallet!
No, I'm sorry, he had a point. An Apple approved McUpdate makes the system unusable until you reinstall the entire OS. Here's something from TFA Today, while working normally, I was "pinged" by Software Update that there were updates ready to install. I said "go ahead".
Halfway through, I received a message similar to "Software Update has encountered an unexpected issue, you must restart".
I selected restart. My machine will no longer boot (on the mac side), getting to the final (~100%) "blue line" on start up screen and than hanging.
I have tried many times (and also let it "think" for many hours) to no avail.
I just returned from the local Apple Store "Genius Bar" (a whole other story - not pleasant) where they tried to boot from CD, but the only option is to erase the entire drive and all data to do so. This guy was sitting there working and Steve Jobs sent him a message, "We Mcwent ahead and Mcdownloaded an Mcupdate. Would you Mclike to install it and reboot-in-tosh-X?" Of course, he's gonna say yes. Now all his stuff is gone. That novel he spent all those hours at Starbucks writing... gone. That Quicktime of his little girl's first steps... gone. All that porn! That glorious, beautiful PORN!!! GONE!!!! Why? Because he trusted Steve Jobs and Apple.
So, yeah, it's not officially bricked, but only a fanboi would argue the definition to someone who has just lost everything on their hard drive. If it were a Windows update that crashed a PC, this McFanBoi would be screaming about how much Windows and Bill Gates suck and how he's so happy he does not have to worry about stuff like that because he has a Mac.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Dont brick me bro!!
Umm.... it has definitely happened in the past on Windows-based boxes with dual or multi-boot configurations set up on them! I remember struggles and research to recover "dead" systems that came about when trying to set up dual-boot configurations with things like IBM OS/2 and Windows, for example. One OS would perform an upgrade over the old one, and in the process clobber the boot record info that was formerly allowing a dual-boot.
And although this is an unfortunate situation, it's hardly a case of Apple "completely fucking up and making a mockery of their own catchphrases".
Apple basically told people all along that using BootCamp on an OS X 10.4 Tiger based Mac was a beta test thing. The final version would be included with Leopard. If Tiger updates end up breaking this feature after the beta period has already expired - I'd almost assume Apple did it on purpose, so people would be more compelled to pay up for the new OS version that actually includes that functionality as a legitimate part of it.
The ability of Macs to dual-boot into Windows isn't some "amazing new thing" in and of itself... The main reason BootCamp was important was because they provided device drivers for all the Apple hardware that Windows couldn't auto-detect and use otherwise (such as the iSight cameras, backlit keyboards on their notebooks, keyboard function keys for volume up/down and screen brightness, etc.)
I've been using a Mac Pro in a dual-boot Windows XP and OS X configuration since I first bought it, and never installed BootCamp on it at all. I simply placed XP on a separate hard drive, rather than trying to partition it out on the same drive.
How is a problem that can be fixed with a reinstall "bricking" a mac? Bricking is when you permanently ruin something! I agree the problem is bad but it isnt that bad!
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
That's what you get for trying to run Windows.
I know this will burn my karma.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Yep. Use this instead.
http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
As they're too big to be bricks.
"Boat anchoring" perhaps?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
just that his attempts to spin this as 'not a big deal' are laughable...
How is it spin when it is true?
Read through the threads in response. There are something like seventeen different reasons why this is not a big deal:
1) If you just let it continue to boot (for a few hours) it will eventually work anyway.
2) Bootcamp being non-functional is an issue the guy would have to face someday anyway, since Bootcamp on Tiger is an expired beta. Anyone using it at all seriously should have a bootable backup of the drive at hand, as it will keep working indefinatley but you cannot reinstall bootcamp at this point (well, unless you are smart enough to set the date back - I guess that's 2.5!).
3) OS X reinstall does not require wiping the whole drive as many people have noted.
Those are three of the biggest ones...
Basically you are coming in and saying a guy with "Mac" in his name (indicating he probably owns a Mac) is incorrect in his assessment, a fact which you (probably not a Mac owner) are in less of a position to determine correctly than he is! Once again, where is the geek-related skills to determine the most likely source of correct knowledge on this issue?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't say i share the experience of the 2 posters above - SMB is now better for me than it has been ever. So well in fact that it's annoying. I get all the windoze servers at my work place showing up automatically on every Finder window's "Server" section. Passwords to sever shares are now finally remembered properly and I continuously log in to these with no probems. Unless it was some other kind of ailment, i suspect these users may be the minority. My 2 cents...
I use Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 for video editing (from the studio bundle). I don't need anything more - I normally use Linux, I only have my Mac so I can do video editing - that is it's pure purpose. Unfortunately I had this machine on the Internet (so it was easier to get texts and research problems etc) and one day a security update went into Tiger and WOOPS! Final Cut Pro doesn't work properly any more (can't take in video without heavy lag (unusable))!
So I use a day researching it, and in the end I find this on Apple's web page: Ah, something broke, you have to upgrade to Final Cut Pro 5. WTF? They want me to pay $much just to continue using my already expensive equipment, for what use? I do not need any of the new features in FCP 5 (or 6), I'm totally fine with 4.5.
So now I have to disconnect it from the Internet, take backup of everything dear, wipe the thing clean and install everything from scratch. Gah, so stupid. Apple is a bad company like all companies. They shit at you while they can.
Yes, I'm quite sure the guy decided to lie to the whole internet, because it is utterly unthinkable that some kid making ten bucks an hour at an Apple Store in a mall somewhere would be wrong, or uninterested in helping.
The people at Genius Bars are not superheroes, they don't actually care about your problems, and the minute percentage of Mac users experiencing this problem does not warrant training every Apple Store employee everywhere.
Apple's a corporation, not your best friend. Learn not to be aghast when someone suggests they may be behaving as such.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Ah, the fall from Grace.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I noticed a change from the final beta of bootcamp to the production version of bootcamp shipping in Leopard. It appears that windows partitioning is done differently.
In the final bootcamp beta, you could delete and recreate the windows partition during the windows installation and still have a bootable installation of windows. Not so in the new (Leopard) version of bootcamp. If you delete the partition created by bootcamp and re-create the partition using the windows installer, your new install of windows will not boot. This usually results in a "hal.dll" error.
I ran into this problem with an unattended installation of Windows XP - my answer file was configured to delete the existing windows partition and recreate / reformat the partition .
I opened a ticket with Apple support, but I haven't gotten any explanations other than a confirmation of what I observed.
-ted