Mac won't boot now...

I opened SL this evening and clicked on "Connect". It asked if I wanted to automatically download the update, and I clicked yes. After downloading and installing, I read the release notes and clicked finish.

At this point SL tried to start itself, but crashed after a few moments. I then clicked the icon on the dock to have it try to launch again, and the whole desktop froze (dock and all), however the mouse could still move.

After waiting several minutes, I tried to restart the computer using the keyboard.. no luck. I then held the power button on the front for a few seconds until the computer turned off. I waited a bit, and then turned it back on.

It sat on the "Apple logo" screen for a few minutes, then displayed the debug console (the entire screen is black with a little white 'command prompt' block in the upper-left hand corner). This remained the only thing on the screen, and the fan(s) inside the computer started spinning faster and faster.

I eventually had to hold the power button to turn the system off. After waiting a minute, I pressed the power button to turn it on and immediately held COMMAND + S (to boot into single user mode).

It keeps printing:

disk0s3: I/O timeout.
dyld: sh can't open library: /usr/lib/libncurses.5.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)
May 31 21:04:37 init: /bin/sh on /etc/rc terminated abnormally, going to single user mode
disk0s3: I/O timeout.
/etc/master.passwd: No such file or directory
disk0s3: I/O timeout.


I've tried running "/sbin/fsck -fy" from that console, but it fails with the same disk0s3 error.

What did the update do to my computer? It's not very old and hasn't had any problems up to this point.

I have a Dual 2.0 G5 running OS X 10.3.9. 1 Gig of RAM. No added peripherals or cards.

Did u by chance download the latest upgrade from apple? I had this problem also. If so boot up in safe mode and go and take out "Adobe version Q". Reboot, it should work fine.

For some reason the apple upgrade does not mix well with Adobe, look for a patch from Adobe soon.

Regards,

Scarlet

The patch is actually out as of today, and it is from Apple. It is QuickTime 7.1.1. Look for it in software update...

Sorry if I seem a little confused, but I'm not sure what Adobe has to do with Second Life (SL).
The only Adobe software I have on the system (other than whatever Adobe system components came pre-bundled) is Photoshop 3.0 (which is for Mac OS 9 or older).

I can't boot up into safe mode.. I can't even get Single-user mode (the plain text console) to function properly. I put the OS X Installer CD in to try and run a disk check, and even that fails on when I run "Verify Disk" and "Repair Disk".

I suppose it could be an extreme coincidence.. but it looks like the Mac OS X Second Life auto-update process killed my hard drive (again, could be a coincidence).

I haven't downloaded or installed any Apple software updates in well over a week (or changed anything at all about the system, for that matter... other than installing Second Life).

Out of curiosity, where do you find the file "Adobe version Q"? Any idea what kind of file it is?

I can't seem to get the hard drive to even respond at this point.. (Disk Utility on the OS X CD can pull up the specs of the drive, but can't verify or repair it).
Thank you for the suggestions though.

Go to the apple website and do a search for "freeze" in the furoms. There is a thread in there all aboout this.


Scarlet

I ordered a second hard drive. I'm going to install OS X 10.3 on it, boot up to that, then try running DiskWarrior. Hopefully that can fix my drive..

It should be able to according to - http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=613279
(I think my problem falls under error message 01 "Volume check failed".)


Just a word of warning to all Mac users: if Second Life crashes right after you run the auto-update... restart your computer before you try to run it again.

Note that I *am* referring to the Mac OS X version of Second Life.. (I don't even have Boot Camp nor an Intel processor).

Thanks for the suggestion Scarlet.

I lost a drive as well. On the plus side it wasn't a boot drive. On the big minus side it was 1/2 of a RAID with 500GB of data on it. No more SL on my main computer. EVER. How long before it's off all of them?

Did the same thing happen to you?

Never, never, never run the "Auto-update" installer for SL. I have always abided by that self-imposed rule - for both my Mac or the PC laptop.

Always have completely trashed SL files, d/l'd a fresh copy of the client, and THEN installed the new version of SL. And, to be safe, I always shutdown and then reboot the entire system.

Also, on the Mac, remember to Verify and Repair disk permissions occasionally with the Disk Utility.

Lastly, there is a great application out there for the Mac called iDeFrag. Regardless of what Apple publishes about Mac OS 10.x.x not needing defragmentation, that is not the case. I purchased iDeFrag and was amazed at how fragmented my HD / System had become. Created the iFrag boot disk, ran the defrag program, and rebooted. Everything was noticeably zippier.

http://coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

Sorry for the non-tech speak... "zippier". That was for Khamon.

*waves at Khamon.

There's a small microprocessor that controls the fans, but it needs the OS to tell it how fast they need to run. Whenever it doesn't hear from the OS for a while, it cranks up the fan speed to be safe.


The "I/O timeout" happens when it attempts to read bad blocks from your hard drive. It looks like your drive is dying. You can confirm that by running a surface scan with something like Tech Tool Pro.


There's nothing fsck can do to fix a hardware problem, and the apparent file system problems are what you get when you read garbage from the disk.

BTW, I don't recommend -y, in spite of what OS X says. That just gives it free license to blindly "fix" things without asking, whether the "fix" is good or not.


It's not the update's fault. Anything could have exacerbated the already dying drive. Writing a lot of files (the viewer is really a whole directory tree - try "ls -R" on it) makes it more likely that some directory information would get bitten.


I saw exactly the same symptom in a friend's new (refurb) iMac G5. Apple seems to have gotten a bunch of Seacrate's floor scrapings.

The drive might be resurrected by mapping out the bad spots, but it's questionable whether you'd want to trust it.

Safe mode and single-user mode are actually orthogonal. Holding down Shift-Command-S boots into safe single-user mode. Whether that works in your case depends on which files happen to be corrupt. In any case, it's unlikely to help you fix anything.


It is (see above).


Attempts to read bad spots are *extremely* slow due to all the unsuccessful retries involved. If you run a surface scan you'll see it hang up for a while at each bad spot. The Apple Hardware Tests will probably run fine since they don't do media tests.

I don't use auto-update, but that's solely because I like to keep the documentation files and the dmg, and I'm sure the auto-updater wouldn't do that. If there were a way to tell auto-update where to save those bits, I'd probably use it.

Windoze is a different story, since if you're not running in a privileged account the auto-update isn't going to work, anyway. Granted, the default config essentially has you running as root, but the wise don't accept that setup.


I don't think I've ever "completely trashed SL files", and I'm sure I've never rebooted just because of an SL update. It's not like Windoze, where many software installers plant time bombs in the registry and you need at least one more reboot than it asks for just to stabilize it. On the Mac, certain applications with tentacles into the system might require rebooting, but I've never known a straightforward nonprivileged application like SL to need a reboot. My uptime is often measured in weeks if I'm not "messing with the system". It would never be that high if I had to reboot for every SL update.


Good advice in general, but almost certainly not the issue here.