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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.
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.
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.)
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
I know I'll probably be modded down for this, but...
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
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!
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.
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
OK, how about we change the players: "Some XP users are having problems with the latest Windows Update, yours truly included. The problem seems to be caused by the presence of a Linux dual boot partition and renders the PC unable to reboot after the update fails. Note that Microsoft is recommending a full disk wipe; but data can be recovered via Firewire."
CNet has a note up that if you fall victim to this "known issue" and need to reformat the disk, you can't reinstall Linux because Microsoft has disallowed dual-booting with XP, so users must upgrade to Vista in order to dual-boot into Linux." Now is it "completely overblown"? Or would you in fact be trashing Microsoft for the next 6 months over this?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000