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System install hackery
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Senior User
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Status:
Offline
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My brother-in-law is in Korea with his ibook.
He connected to the net, saw a bunch of system updates (he was 10.3) and installed. All went well until the 10.35 update. It hung for hours during the install portion of the download.
Eventually he force rebooted. Bad call. Now his system will get to the finder background picture and crash.
He has his 10.3 install CDs but doesn't have enough room for an 'archive and install' (he has 600 megs of free space and it requires 2 gigs). The 10.3 disk won't do a normal "update" because it says the current version of the system is newer than what is on the CD. He doesn't want to do a full install and lose his home folder. Apple Korea is unhelpful. He knows of no other macs around to start in firewire mode, back up, and reinstall a clean system.
Any ideas?
Is there a way he can log in in in su mode at startup and delete some music files (which are backed up) so he has enough room for an archive and install?
What about safe mode? Will this help him?
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Senior User
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Status:
Offline
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nothing from the assembled crowd?
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: The Sar Chasm
Status:
Offline
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He needs to get his hands on a Firewire drive, if possible. What I'd do (He's not me, of course) is
1. Install OS onto Firewire drive, and boot from it.
2. Create user(s) with exact same username and password. (just to avoid permissions difficulties)
3. Copy all data and neccessary apps from internal to external.
4. Verify that all my data is intact on Firewire drive.
5. Re-format internal drive with Disk Utility.
6. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone FW to internal.
Pain in the butt, I know, but that's the best I can come up with.
(edit-- streamlined a bit after further thought.)
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Last edited by chris v; Nov 7, 2004 at 12:35 AM.
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When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Aug 2004
Status:
Offline
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Originally posted by barbarian:
nothing from the assembled crowd?
The best way to fix this is to find another Mac, connect the two with a FireWire cable and start the iBook Holding the "T" key, this will put it in "Target Disc Mode" and it will mount on the other Mac's Desktop as a FireWire drive. Download the 10.3.5 combo Update from Safari. Run the Update and chose the iBook's Harddrive to Install to from the list.
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Joy!peffpwpc
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: FFM
Status:
Offline
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It's not said in the user's manual, but do not run OS X with so little free space. It's good to have 20% of the hard disk free (so that the computer has room to work with) but at least make it 2 GB free.
Maybe he can boot into single user mode and delete enough stuff from there to allow the Archive & Install. If not he needs to get an external hard drive, boot from the system CD and install a system on the external drive, boot from the external drive, make enough room on the internal and then archive & install on the internal.
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