Re: Can't Upgrade to 10.2.8 (!)

I am on a Wallstreet with 10.2.8 right now. I very recently swapped out
its hard drive and had to reinstall 10.2.8 as well as restore the rest
of the drive from backup. Using Software Update to get to 10.2.8 was
completely successful.

So far in this thread we have not been getting to the root of the
problem. My best guess, without being able to work with the machine, is
that your hard drive is having a problem. But let's do the basics first.
Forgive me if you have already tried them:

1) Shutdown and do a Power Reset: Hold down these keys for about 5
seconds: Shift-fn-ctrl-Power. You should see the green power light come
on and hear the fan run. Now boot. It is likely that you will get a
black screen. Don't be afraid to hit ctrl-command-Power to reboot if the
machine appears to be locked up. With a power reset you should not have
to zap the PRAM. But you can do it if you wish. It won't hurt anything.

2) Most likely after the Power Reset you will boot into Mac OS 9. It
does not matter. The next step is to clear out Open Firmware in two
steps. First, you want to reboot then immediately hit these keys:
Command-Option-o-f. This will bring you into the Open Firmware CLI.
A) Type 'reset-nvram' and hit return.
B) Type 'reset-all' and hit return.
This will reboot the machine again.

3) Before we go so far as to wipe the volume, go over to
VersionTracker.com and grab the freeware application called 'AppleJack'.
Install it. It is a CLI application that will announce itself when you
boot into Single User Mode. (Hold down Command-S while you reboot).
AppleJack will give you a fairly simple interface. You start by typing
'AppleJack' and hitting enter. Then go through steps 1-5. Of course if
step 1, the repair step, shows any problems, the repeat it until there
are no problems. Then proceed to 2, 3, 4, 5. This will repair any
permissions problems that may be the cause of the problem, wipe your
cache files, isolate damaged .plist files and wipe your virtual memory.
Read the notes with AppleJack for other options. Reboot when you are
done.

4) I don't know if you have volume partitions or are using just one
volume. But I believe you should wipe the entire Mac OS X volume in any
case then attack it with a repair utility. I highly recommend
DiskWarrior. This means you have to boot to a different partition volume
or you need to boot to a repair disk CD. In my opinion running Disk
Utility from the install CD can be useful occasionally, but it will not
catch all the problems.

5) If none of the above helped then you should wipe the Mac OS X volume
and start again.

6) If that fails, and you have more than one volume on the hard drive,
you should erase the entire drive, preferably writing the entire thing
with zeros, then test the drive. If you are able to boot to a Mac OS 9
install CD you can do all this from the Drive Setup application. I
believe v2.07 was the last.

Other possibilities:

A) Loose or bad RAM - Remove, reseat. Test with the Memtest application
available at VersionTracker. It has to be run from Single User Mode in
the CLI.

B) Something damaging data coming into your computer from the Internet.
I am not experienced with the problem, sorry.

This is certainly not a complete list of things to try, but it the best
I can come up with off the top of my head.

Best Wishes!

:-Derek



In article <060420060932470541%star@xxxxxxx>, Davoud <star@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

One of my Macs is a PowerBook WallStreet 300/384MB RAM. It had been
running OS 10.2.8 quite nicely until a recent incident in which a
driver installation hosed OS 10.2.8 rendering it unbootable. It would
boot into OS 9, and doing so and running several disk utilities failed
to fix the problem. I reinstalled OS 10.2 from the original disk.

That went without a problem, and everything works. But I'm at 10.2.0
and I want to get back to 10.2.8. The upgrade installer won't run,
however; double clicking the package causes the installer app to load,
but everything is grayed out; there is no "Continue..." button to
click. I have tried getting the package by several means: software
update (fails, though other updates came through); direct download
(install fails as described above) and download on another Mac and
transferring the package via the network or a portable hard drive
(install fails as described above.)

Ideas most welcome! TIA.

--
Fortune Magazine, 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today?
Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been equalled for ease
of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge.
<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/12/8363107/>
[Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'. He spearheaded
the movement to modernize computer software engineering in 1975]
.