11/26/2007, 7:15am, EST
Monday, November 26th
Tiger update forces some to reformat
"Reports from trusted sources indicate Apple may have shipped the software update with a known bug, and owners of some Macs have seen their systems become inoperable since installing the software," the publication said. "When restarting, users find their Mac partition hangs in the blue screen. Apple support staff appear to suggest the only solution is to erase the entire drive an all data in order to resolve the problem."
The report said that the flaw is known to have affected an analyst firm's former Apple analyst:
"It is evidence (in my opinion) of very sloppy software release. To crash a system on a known problem with Boot Camp is 100 per cent totally unacceptable. People (like me) have just too much stuff on their systems to be having to start over with hard disk reformat," the analyst told Macworld UK.
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First of all:
- This does NOT affect all 10.4.11 users. The vast, overwhelming majority of 10.4.11 users have not experienced this issue. At our site alone we have hundreds of Tiger Boot Camp users, and have not seen this problem.
- Because it only affects such a small fraction of 10.4.11 users, there is NO EVIDENCE whatsoever to support any claim that Apple is "knowingly" doing anything of the sort to get Tiger users to stop using Boot Camp.
- The claims made in the linked article are BS:
1. There is no reason I can think of why an Archive and Install wouldn't work to recover from the situation.
2. There is no reason I can think of, even if an Archive and Install didn't work, that just the Mac partition couldn't be erased and reinstalled. And no, this isn't some "special case". There is NO REASON why simply erasing the Mac partition, as opposed to reformatting the entire drive and losing the Boot Camp partition, wouldn't work. And on top of that, an Archive and Install should work.
3. The article seems to imply that all data is unrecoverable. Whaaa? At the very least, you can always view the contents of the drive from another system.
This is a sloppy, sloppy article and deserves to be killed here and now before it starts getting picked up everywhere as Apple trying to somehow kill off Tiger Boot Camp users. (To say nothing of the fact that Boot Camp for Tiger was ALWAYS advertised as use-at-your-own-risk unsupported beta software that would effectively disappear once Leopard shipped.)
What a shamefully ridiculous story.
which of course, is better written than this one.
Apple's System Software has been quite sloppy of late.
Bugs in in 10.5.1 still exist. AirDisk still doesn't work right. My mini doesn't reconnect to AirPort when waking from sleep. iTunes crashes or refuses to skip ahead in a shared song. Just to name a few.
It's obvious that someone in the OS Team is asleep at the wheel. Please Kool-Aid drinkers, stop defending.
I installed 10.4.11 on both of my personal machines (iMac 24" and 15" MBP) that are using Boot Camp and both took the update just fine.
One additional note...only a novice would not have proper CURRENT back-up before installing a system update. Remember folks, back-up, back-up, back-up. :-)
I wish I could remember the error, but anyway I was really spooked. When I tried to reboot, my MacBook Pro only got as far as the gray screen with the counter wheel spinning endlessly.
Eventually I did an Archive and Install and ran a Combo Update and everything was back to normal. Most of my User prefs carried over, so I didn't have to do much extra work. I had to reinstall my Airport Extreme Base Station N software since that didn't carry over (my AirDisks showed as mounted, but I couldn't see any files). The AEBSn reinstall fixed that problem.
I also had a BootCamp partition and that also worked fine. Maybe I could even say that everything worked slightly better than before the Archive and Install.
I've done many updates and never had this happen so it was just a rare occurrence as far as I can tell.