Mac OS X Combo Fixer

August 16, 2004

Some people just have crappy luck. A client switched from a Dell laptop to a 15" PowerBook (Aluminum) a few weeks back. Things went swimmingly for 48 hours, until some punk broke out his passenger window and sprinted off with it. The thief just got lucky, since his car windows were blacked-out tinted— no way Mr. Thief knew what was in there.

So the new replacement arrives and we did the data-migration from the Dell to the Mac one-more-time. The very last thing we did before leaving for the evening was run Software Update to do the multi-meg upgrades that were waiting. The next morning Mr. Client returned to a kernel-panic. Uh oh. It was hosed— fsck and Disk First Aid failed to help; so did Disk Warrior. An Archive Install didn't bring it back.

So, a reformat and zero-all-data was done, and we started all over. It lasted a couple of weeks until this morning, after running the 10.3.5 and associated Software Updates, which all ran just fine, then the client rebooted. The PowerBook booted up to the Login Window, but then dumped him out to a command-line console login. fsck reported no errors. Poking around in the system.log and nuking the com.apple.loginwidow.plist and com.apple.windowserver.plist didn't bring it back.

On a hunch we booted in FireWire Target Disk mode and plugged it in to another Mac. Then we downloaded and installed the Mac OS X 10.3.5 Combined Installer. It didn't boot, but hung right away. So we booted from a 10.3 Installer CD and ran a Repair Permissions. Then it booted up

After logging-in, it threw an error from the AppleSlewClock.kext. So we just copied one over from another 10.3.5 install, changed ownership and permission to match the rest of the extension. We were back in business.