Installing a Mac OS/X update? Don't Touch!

With apologies to Mrs. Piggle Wiggle - "Installer's Mac! Don't Touch!"

This posting at Unsanity.org provided a belated explanation of how I managed to kill one of the iMacs at work. I was installing the 10.4.9 update, and during the 'optimizing system performance' phase had the bad idea to ask "I wonder what the CPU frequency is on these 17" C2duo iMacs"? I went to the apple menu, selected 'about this mac' and was instantly greeted with the Mac OS/X equivalent of a blue screen of death - the screen went gray with the little spinning dashed circle in the middle bottom of the screen. It sat like that for quite a while - more than 15 minutes. I had to pull the power cord to get it to shut down. I got the same persistent spinning circle on reboot, and had to yank the power cord to power it off.

I booted it into verbose mode, and got a message indicating that dynamic linking was failing for a process at boot time - it looked like I'd somehow managed to wipe out libstdc++.6.dylib. Ugh...

Booting the iMac into target disk mode, I copied the user's files over to my macbook, and then did a fresh system install preserving the user info and applications.

I was pleased that the the new install worked smoothly, and did what it promised to do - it kept all the user accounts and apps. However, it was a bit unnerving, and not at all what I expected from a mac. If there are user actions that can kill the machine, it would be nice to have them blocked (or at least tell the user "don't touch!") while the update is underway.

Anyway, the unsanity.org post in the link is well worth reading if you're interested in interesting bugs.