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.

Comments

Macs

[Tumbleweed]

"They just _work_."

Re:Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

Gasp! Something makes them unable to run... WINDOWS!!!

MS has the same thing. It's called "VISTA"

Re:Macs

[CoreDump01]

If you can get it to work again via routine tasks (like reinstalling the OS on HDD) it is technically not a brick. A "bricked" Mac would almost always require you to send in the machine to the manufacturer to unbrick.

Re:Macs

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah if you're running a beta boot loader that you've hacked to prevent it from expiring (or intentionally set your system clock to a couple months ago) and you install an OS system update on it without waiting to see how it works on other people's hacked machines, then your system may not boot until you fix it. Why is the OS relevant in this case again?

Re:Macs

[cloricus]

Moreso what is with the over use of the term 'bricked' lately. My understanding was that 'to brick a device' was to make it unusable ever again creating a possibly expensive paperweight. The last handful of stories using the term (mostly related to Apple) have all had undo solutions leaving the hardware in a working state. Did a miss a memo some where a long the way?

Re:Macs

[kestasjk]

What?! I haven't seen anything about these users running a beta boot loader hacked to prevent it expiring, it only seems to be related to Boot Camp.

Why is the OS an issue? Well on non-Apple PCs booting into other OSes is taken for granted, and isn't expected to affect OS updates. Apparently on Macs booting into other OSes is an amazing new innovation called "Boot Camp", and an update to an OS causes the ability to dual boot to break, and requires you to reformat your entire hard disk.

Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely fuck up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?

Re:Macs

[dwater]

Your problem is that you're not thinking different enough.

Re:Macs

[porkus]

You obviously haven't tried to print to a Windows-shared printer with options like Landscape or n-up printing. Or you haven't tried to add a printer shared from an older Mac, since they turned off CUPS browsing by default in Leopard for no apparently good reason. You may also not have noticed how flaky connecting to SMB shared drives can be. Leopard most certainly does not _just work_ for everyone. I'm back on Tiger and at this point looks like I'll be staying until 10.5.2 at the earliest.

Yeah

[DurendalMac]

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.

OSX 10.4.11

[Ethanol-fueled]

Just reached #11 on CNET UK's "Worst Consumer Tech" list ;)

*ducks*

that's the Beta Bootcamp only

[2ms]

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.

Meanwhile The Linux World Continues To Flounder

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I have a 17" iMac bought one month after this guy

[theurge14]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[644bd346996]

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.)

Standard reply to end users

[guruevi]

That's what you get for trying to run Windows.

I know this will burn my karma.

Re:Completely Overblown

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"Completely overblown?"

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?