Comments on: Impressed

By: Lensmaster

Lensmaster — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:07:34 +0000

Nice site Too bad noone visits mine ;(

By: MJ

MJ — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 02:44:08 +0000

Nice… i seem to be having a very similar problem, i have tryed reinstaling the OSX, but the problem starts up again.
Is can anyone give me some inside into this ‘Archive and Install’, i think i know how to do it, but i need a quick lesson in it

Would really appreciated

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:50:09 +0000

many panics during boot-up are the result of corrupted NVRAM and/or PRAM. If you have not already cleared it, you should do so. The following article will provide additional details.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

Your note that the problem seems most present after a forced power down is a good clue, as such action is quite likely to result in corrupted settings. if your system doesn’t know where it started, it can easily become lost during use.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:32:13 +0000

wow, wasn’t expecting quite so many responses.

Just a little background info. The problem I was having was a kernel panic on bootup so I was fairly sure it wasn’t a user space issue (OK I know its not impossible, but it was unlikely). Also it wasn’t any one particular application or anything that caused the problem. Additionally this is a first generation iMac G5 so hardware problems aren’t exactly rare, its already been back once for an overheating problem.

Now that the system is reinstalled I’m a little more sure its a hardware problem as the same thing is happening again. It didn’t start occuring until I installed gcc-4.0 but I don’t see that the two can be related, more just a matter of bad timing. Bascially the whole thing just comes to a grinding halt in a random app at a random time (it does tend to do it more when its pushed harder tho) and I am forced to do a power off/on. Upon rebooting it gets as far as the blue “Loading OSX” screen and then drops back to a Darwin (ie command prompt) logon which doesn’t accept any of the normal logons. Same problem as before.

I can normally get back in eventually through a series of boots into Single user mode + fscks + mounts/umounts. When I’m in single user mode the system won’t let me mount ‘/’ as read/write as it gives an error replaying the journal. Eventually after a few reboots and fscks I can mount it read/write and then boot OSX normally. I then wait about 15 minutes and it freezes starting the whole cycle again.

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:27:54 +0000

I am appalled at the “pro consulting” advice from macguitarman. He obviously is not Thinking Different, he’s stuck in the old OS 9 mentality, and not Thinking Unix. Get up to speed, man, this is the 21st century! The solution to every problem is not a reformat and reinstall, this isn’t Windows!
There is an easy way to tell if a software problem is in the userspace or the OS. Simply create a new user account, log in to that account, which will have fresh, unused user preferences for everything. Then run the problematic app, see if the problem goes away.
If the problem goes away, the problem is most likely to be in the user’s account preferences. If the problem does not go away, it is in the System preferences. If it’s in the OS prefs, an Archive and Install is perfectly safe. If it is in the user prefs, there are other debugging techniques besides a total reinstall. For example, there are several command-line tools to validate .plist files (for example, AppleJack). Or you could just create a new account, designate it the Administrator, and abandon the old admin account and delete it.
So, Mr. Guitarman, I sure pity your clients, they deserve someone who knows WTF he is doing (which ain’t you).

By: John C. Randolph

John C. Randolph — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:43:55 +0000

Macguitarman,

I was an Apple engineer for 3 1/2 years, and I *always* used “archive and install”. If an app is behaving strangely after updating the OS, I’d just throw away its folder in my ~/Library/Application Support/ directory, and/or throw away its preferences.

The only systems I’ve ever had trouble with when using archive and install were internal development builds. It’s never been a problem with any released version for me.

-jcr

By: me

me — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:54:12 +0000

Download Cocktail and run it. It wil clear caches and repair permissions which fixes an awful lot of issues. You can also repair permissions using Disk Utility which comes with your Mac. Some prettty minor maintenance like this will kepp your Mac running smoothly unlike Winodws where you have to run multiple spyware apps, anti-vrius, registry cleaners etc.

By: macGuru

macGuru — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:26:37 +0000

Howdy!

When you boot up to reinstall, when you get to the first install window, select Disk Utility from the Install menu. Reformat the drive. Now go back and reinstall. Copy things like songs, and photos, but recreate your other prefs.

One way to see if the prefs are causing problems, you can always create a second account and start launching apps to see if the same problems occur. This can help figure out if it is on a user level or on a system level.

Hope this helps.

By: macguitarman

macguitarman — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:12:30 +0000

By transferring over your “old” User prefs, you are inheriting the same old issues that plagued you prior to re-installing OS X. Just as if you never re-installed OS X in the first place.

Documents, movies, music, media are one thing (and even they can get corrupted, corrupted plists, etc, will cause havoc.

99% of issues can be traced to a sofware (OS, App) issue. If that doesn’t fix it in that case then you have a hardware issue, bad ram, drive, mother baord, etc.

I have been doing pro apple consulting for years now and I never, never do a “archive and install” you do no want to inherit issues. I have only seen issues with this, Erase and Install is the only way to go, of course I use Super Duper and have a “base” OS 10.4.2 image ready to go, it images in 7 minutes or so and OS X is back to the way it used to be solid as ever.

Also keep in mind if you are one that is always changing the state of the “image” by installing more and more apps, share ware, whatever ware, it doesnt matter, then by definition the image “state” is always changing, it’s hard to predict interactions with all of the apps installed and / or open.

Having every damn OS X app out there installed just because “I have to have it” is not smart computing, it only leads to slow performance and unstable behavior, pick the apps you use most and go with that.

Apple must have “Portable User Directories” soon hopefully in 10.4.3 or later, so we can move them to other partitions without, Permissions issues, which by the way still plague 10.4x, (have to still use Batchmod to fix, because the Finder is still awful at it.

By: CPT

CPT — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:33:01 +0000

Applications are installed on the mac in a completely SANE way. They basically keep everything in their own directory that isn’t user-config dependant. This is why you can install and uninstall a mac application by dragging it to the applications folder or trash can.

KDE are talking about implementing a similar system for KDE4, which after playing with the mac I completely support.