My first 'problem' with OS X

[srwatters]

As most here know, I'm quite the Apple fan after switching from Windows in 2004. Aside from the normal upgrade path (Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard), I've never had any software problems requiring a re-install or other serious work on my three Macintosh machines. Until this weekend, that is.

On Saturday morning I was greeted with the software update dialog that stated there were two packages available for my 2007 Mac Pro. One was the Java update for Leopard and the second was security update 2009-001. I like to keep my machines up to date, so I hit the Install button and went to kitchen to get some coffee. When I returned, the machine asked for a reboot, and I pushed OK. The system shut down and started to boot, but never got beyond the 'blue screen' that displays after the kernel boots, but before the login prompt appears.

I spent the better part of the morning searching for knowledge base issues related to these software patches, but I seemed to be unique in my problem. Of course I have current backups, so I booted on my Leopard DVD and used Time Machine to restore the most recent machine state before the software updates. A couple hours later when it finished, another reboot was greeted with the same blue screen :-(

To make a long story short, I opted for the 'Archive and Install' option preserving the user accounts and network settings. I was a little nervous, so I went off to Fry's and bought two new 1TB disks first and cloned my original system disk using SuperDuper! and did the work on the new disk. Several hours later the system was back up and running now with 4 1TB disks. My original system disk and time machine backup are on the shelf as security should something go a muck. Good news is that I didn't have to reinstall any applications and all but a couple of user preferences were preserved. It still wasted most of my Sunday doing the hardware swap and recovery, but it was easier than if I would have reinstalled from scratch.

I still stand by my opinion that I would be doing this more often with Windows and hope it will be at least another 4+ years before I have to do this again...

[Supermanny]

I'm sorry to hear about your unplanned downtime Scott. So what was the root cause?

Sometimes I think too hard about computers and technology. And I'm just amazed that things work...at all.

[Graff]

I had a similar issue and Apple replaced my HD. The Unit was about 4 months old? So i did not have much to backup. Glad your up and working.

[srwatters]

The root cause appeared to be some corruption in the graphics software. The system would boot into 'safe mode' and I also took the time to do a clean install on an old 500GB drive that I had. Once that system was up, I was pretty confident that the problem was software and nothing to do with the hardware (except maybe a disk issue). During the last big storms we had, I did experience one power failure and perhaps that caused some problem. I'll never really know unless I really spend some time debugging. Not worth it to me unless something else happens on this new install.

[ChuckW]

Glad to hear that you got everything working - and isn't SuperDuper a great piece of software! A couple of things you probably already know but I'll throw them out for the potential benefit of others: You say that you "never" got beyond the blue screen after the kernel boots, but how long was "never"? Some times I have found that if one waits for what seems an inordinate amount of time (maybe 15 minutes) the reboot completes and all works fine from then on. Another thing to try is to try rebooting while holding down the shift key to initiate a safe boot. Then when successfully rebooted, download and install the latest combo update from Apple w/o using software update. This latter procedure has saved me a couple of times.

[srwatters]

Chuck, I waited about 30 minutes the first time. I also booted into safe mode and installed the downloaded combo package from a USB stick. I was all over the Apple Discussions web site and tried several other things including verbose boot. I really think something else was corrupted on the disk and it never showed up until I tried to install the update and reboot. BTW, I only reboot OS X when it's required or we're having storms and I want to completely shut down and unplug. The system is set to sleep at midnight and wakes at 6:00AM.

[The Loft Studios]

Not sure if our problems were related, Scott.
But I had a similar issue about a year or so back, the same thing occurred right after an update.
But, I unplugged everything from my computer, including all networks and peripherals, waited about half an hour, then plugged everything back in and rebooted.

Wha-La..... Yea, Baby!!!

Needless to say, I was happy and have not encountered that since, even with recent updates.

Good to see everything worked out for you.

[Concisus Cognatus]

It would have been interesting to know what would have happened by zaping PRAM during the reboot process.

[srwatters]

Originally Posted by nikonhobbyman

It would have been interesting to know what would have happened by zaping PRAM during the reboot process.

Did that.
Also reset the SMC.

I was very thorough before I opted for the Archive & Install.