[X4U] Problem w/ 10.3.5 -- Me too!

[bsletten at nova.org]

> I rarely have problems updating my QS DP800, but yesterday everything on
> my screen was locked except for my cursor. After waiting awhile, I shut
> it down and restarted and it showed 10.3.5 so I figured all was okay.

I've never had a problem with an OS X update either until yesterday. I was
at work when I saw that it had downloaded the upgrade but I waited until I
got home. I did my wife's PB first and it went without a hitch. Then,
mine. It froze while it was 58% through writing the installation files.
Eek!

Lost mouse and everything. Couldn't ssh in from another machine. Couldn't
do squat.

At this point panic set in because I realized how complacent I'd become
and hadn't done a good back up in a while (it's a brand new PB I picked up
in May).

Upon rebooting it didn't quite work but it kind of did. I've got verbose
boot mode on by default so I saw it struggling to come up.

"Failed to load extension com.apple.driver.ApplePMU"

That didn't look good.

Eventually it thought it could and thought it could and came up to the
login window, but I had no mouse or keyboard activity. It was almost like
its sheer will to live got it there but to no avail.

Long story longer, I've learned that even when Macs don't "just work" they
still might "just work". A friend reminded me about booting it into
FireWire mode (holding down 'T' during boot) and I was able to recover
everything but my time by copying stuff off to another Mac.

I wrote mainly in the hope of kicking others out of their complacency
before they attempted this. Not to put too fine a point on it: BACK UP
YOUR IMPORTANT STUFF BEFORE DOING SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I know everyone
knows this. *I* knew it, I was just lazy.

I don't think there is necessarily something wrong with 10.3.5 (although
the possibility exists). I think doing a fresh reboot prior to an upgrade
is probably not a bad idea (given that I had changed locations and had
about 1,000 things before I shut them all down to do the install).

I am able to boot into open firmware but have not yet figured out how to
boot from there to the CD-ROM. For some reason holding down 'C' doesn't
seem to work for that. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.