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September 21, 2008
Apple devastates, Apple saves
Late on Saturday night, despite knowing better, I let Software Update try to update me to OS X 10.5.5 on my Mac Pro at home. The next morning I discovered it hung trying to run the installation scripts. After that, booting up was completely out of the question -- the system was totally fubar. Boo Software Update!
I struggled with it for a while, and finally got it to boot from the install DVD by holding down Option during startup then selecting the DVD ROM drive. Unfortunately, there's no way to get verbose output when booting from a DVD, and so I kept resetting thinking it wasn't going to work, and wasting time trying other things. Oh, and to load the DVD I had to remind myself of the "hold mouse button during boot" trick to get the drive tray to open. Finally, I gave up and left it alone trying to boot from DVD, and ta da! It worked.
From there -- smooth sailing. Restoring my system drive from the Time Machine backup worked like a charm, and I was back up and running on 10.5.4 with no data loss. Yay Time Machine!
Posted by ljh at 11:16 PM