More and more impressed

C

Cloudane

Guest
So finally I get a replacement for the 12" powerbook that was nabbed from me and start getting things nicely set up. Ran the System Update tool and grabbed updates such as OS 10.3.4. For some reason when I plugged a USB mouse in during the 'optimization' bit the kernel panicked (oops, a bug in 10.3.3 maybe!), spewed a nice little pile of text all over the GUI and halted.

No longer would it boot up, it'd freeze at "Starting Apple File Server". Further investigation through single-user mode (once again I love their decision to put OS X on top of a BSD core!) indicated that libxml2 was still the old version (8.0) and not the new one (9.0) that practically every component of OS 10.3.4 requires. So I managed to disable Apple File Server and the Printing Server but the login window also required it so I was sunk. The only way would be to scour the 'net for the libxml2 file of the correct version from another computer, burn it to CD yada yada.

So I thought "oh boy, reinstall time already... have to install all those apps all over again and tweak all the settings..."

Then I discovered the wonders of "Archive and Install". Unbelievable! It's all back up and running, took about 30 minutes. All the apps are still there, all the items on the desktop, and on the dock, all the settings are the same as they were before, all documents and files are still there, even icons in folders are still in the same positions. Nothing at all has changed.

I'd love to see Windows or Linux do *that*, especially Windows with its registry :) The way they've completely separated the system from everything else is amazing. Just more kudos to Apple, I wish I'd bought one a long time ago.
 
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what a nice story! Thanks for sharing! :)
 
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and the windows version would go something like...

Backup and Crash or Backup and Lost

sorry... nothing personal about the hardware. Just hate windows.:D
 

rman


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You learned a valuable lesson. Don't plug any thing in while the system is optimizating.
 
OP
C

Cloudane

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Shouldn't matter. If the OS is designed properly (as MacOS/BSD are, it was obviously a bug) then something trivial like plugging in fully functioning hardware shouldn't cause a kernel panic no matter *what* the system is doing :)
 
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The Kernel can have a Panic at any time, that's just life... Mac OS X is a very young OS when compared to Unix, Windows and Linux, but it's still way ahead of it's time. Come-on windows catch up!
 

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