10.4.8 Update Screwed Up My Computer

J

jayinorlando

Registered
Greetings,

About a week ago, I installed the osx 10.4.8 update as my software update suggested, and now my computer is a mess. (I have a PowerBook PowerPC G4 with a 1.67 GHz processor and 1.5 GB of DDR2 SDRAM.)

Problems include: my dvd/cd drive is not recognized, my digital camera is not recognized when I try to connect it to my computer, and if I go to "More Info" under "About this Mac" and click on "Disc Burning" then the program automatically shuts down. I have not tried connecting my external hard drive, but I imagine it won't work either. I have spent hours researching online to try to find some way to resolve this issue. I found someone who had a similar problem, and someone suggested they download the osx combo update and install it, so I tried doing that. But when I try, verification fails and so I cannot open the program.

Does anyone have a suggestion of what I can do to resolve this? I am in a real jam without access to my CD drive and without being able to download pictures from my camera to my computer.

Thanks so much.

Jay
 
Get the 10.4.8 combo updater from apple.com and update to 10.4.8 again. See if that helps.
 
I've downloaded the combo updater, but when I download it, it says "verification failed." If I try opening the file from my desktop, then it doesn't open. Any ideas on how to deal with that?
 
Verification failed? usually means that you have a bad download. Trash that one, and download again. Restart your Mac, before you begin to install that update. That will help assure that some running process/application is not interfering with the install. After the install and the required re-boot, be sure to repair your disk permissions (through Disk Utility)
 
Trash the combo updater, then empty the trash.
Reboot either with the most current OS install disk you have, or boot into single user mode a check the drive health.

If you boot from the install CD then use disk utility to repair the hard drive/primary boot volume.

if you boot into single user mode, type the command: fsck -yf

in either boot scenario, run the repair operation again if there were errors.

If the same errors keep coming up, backup your home folder/s and any third part apps you installed, then try reformatting the drive with the "write zeros" option. The write zeros option will let the drive detect obvious bad sectors and "map them out" so data can't be written to those sectors. You do not need to reformat if the repair operation/s were successful.

When the format operation is done, reinstall the OS from scratch, create your user account/s and restore your data and apps.
Some third party apps may require they be reinstalled.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I botted from the install CD, repaired the hard drive, and it did so successfully.

Now I just tried downloading the combo update, and it is still the same problem - it's stuck on "verifying the disk image" and won't finish verifying.

I appreciate your help on this so far. Any thoughts on what to do now? Am I going to have to format the hard drive and start over?

I'm really no expert, so I don't know how to best backup my programs and files so that I can access them after I've formatted the hard drive. Plus I cannot access my DVD/CD drive because of this problem, so I can't burn files to a DVD to reinstall after the reformat.
 
hmmm.

things to try:
Reboot into open firmware (hold down command-option-o-f keys while booting up). When the white screen with black type shows up, release the keys.
Then type the following two commands, each followed by the return key
reset-nvram
reset-all
Your computer will reboot. See if the problems are resolved.

Try creating a new admin user account and see if that account experiences the same problem/s.

If it doesn't experience the same issues, then it was something whacky with your user account. The options expand considerable in this case.

If it does experience the same problem, then you can try doing an Archive Install of the OS.
 
Thanks, Flying Meat. I did the reset-nvram and reset-all but the problem persists. I also tried creating a new admin account, but no luck solving the problem.

What are the pros and cons of doing an Archive Install of OSX?

Jay
 
There aren't too many cons if done right (the defaults for archive and install is to preserver user accounts and something else I forget right at the moment), but it is pretty straight forward.

As stated by eric2006, you will have a new folder on your drive named Previous System, or something like that. It's a safety net that you probably won't need, so when you are confident your machine is running like it should again, delete the Previous System folder.

The CD only installs the OS version that came on it.

You basically have 3 options regarding system installs from CD:
Upgrade Install = not applicable in your case
Archive Install = applicable, and defaults are non destructive
Clean install = applicable but destructive (erases the drive and installs from scratch

It's usually a good idea to have a current backup, but since you cannot use the built in optical drive while booted from the hard drive, you could try an external CD burner, or external hard drive. Another option is to boot the machine up in FireWire Target Disk mode and connect it to another "modern" Mac via firewire, then backup your stuff when the problem machine mounts on the desktop of the other Mac.
 
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