Apple 10.4.11 Update Can Brick Macs With Boot Camp

g-san writes "Some Mac users are having problems with the latest 10.4.11 update, yours truly included. The problem seems to be caused by the presence of a Boot Camp partition and renders the Mac unable to reboot after the update fails. Note the Geniuses at the Apple stores are recommending a full disk wipe; but data can be recovered via Firewire." MacNN has a note up that if you fall victim to this "known issue" and need to reformat the disk, you can't reinstall Boot Camp because it is no longer available to OS X 10.4 Tiger users.

Macs

"They just _work_."

Re:Macs

Gasp! Something makes them unable to run... WINDOWS!!!

MS has the same thing. It's called "VISTA"

Re:Macs

1) Dual boot OS X and Windows
2) ???
3) Failure!

Re:Macs

If you can get it to work again via routine tasks (like reinstalling the OS on HDD) it is technically not a brick. A "bricked" Mac would almost always require you to send in the machine to the manufacturer to unbrick.

Re:Macs

I agree that it does not render the MAc bricked, but I'd dispute that reinstalling an OS is routine. It might be simple, fast, easy etc.. but its not and shouldn't have to be routine.

Re:Macs

You obviously haven't tried to print to a Windows-shared printer with options like Landscape or n-up printing. Or you haven't tried to add a printer shared from an older Mac, since they turned off CUPS browsing by default in Leopard for no apparently good reason. You may also not have noticed how flaky connecting to SMB shared drives can be. Leopard most certainly does not _just work_ for everyone. I'm back on Tiger and at this point looks like I'll be staying until 10.5.2 at the earliest.

Re:Macs

1) Power off the computer
2) perform paper-clip origami
3) stick it in the hole to pop the CD tray open

Back in the day when I was doing desktop support, I just kept a bent paper clip in my toolbox.

Re:Macs

remember the "drag the hard drive to the trash to eject it" bug? i can't remember which version of mac OS it was, something pre OS9 I think.

Re:Macs

Yeah if you're running a beta boot loader that you've hacked to prevent it from expiring (or intentionally set your system clock to a couple months ago) and you install an OS system update on it without waiting to see how it works on other people's hacked machines, then your system may not boot until you fix it. Why is the OS relevant in this case again?

Re:Macs

Moreso what is with the over use of the term 'bricked' lately. My understanding was that 'to brick a device' was to make it unusable ever again creating a possibly expensive paperweight. The last handful of stories using the term (mostly related to Apple) have all had undo solutions leaving the hardware in a working state. Did a miss a memo some where a long the way?

Re:Macs

This comment is offensive to the n00b5 worldwide who have in fact been pwn3d by l33t h4x0rz.

Re:Macs

Huh?

The bootloader doesn't expire. The only thing that expired is the Boot Camp partitioning software. Existing boot camp partitions, and your ability to boot into them, are unaffected by Boot Camp Beta's expiry.

Re:Macs

What?! I haven't seen anything about these users running a beta boot loader hacked to prevent it expiring, it only seems to be related to Boot Camp.

Why is the OS an issue? Well on non-Apple PCs booting into other OSes is taken for granted, and isn't expected to affect OS updates. Apparently on Macs booting into other OSes is an amazing new innovation called "Boot Camp", and an update to an OS causes the ability to dual boot to break, and requires you to reformat your entire hard disk.

Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely fuck up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?

Re:Macs

Your problem is that you're not thinking different enough.

Re:Macs

Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely f-BEEP-k up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?

I'm with you on this one. (as I type away on my Mac-mini) I would be UTTERLY LIVID if a Windows update horked my grub bootloader, Apple deserves no less rage for this shenanigan. Apple, are you listening?

I have a problem with them dictating what I can and can't do with their stuff, especially when they'd previously indicated that I can do this. And no, I don't have boot camp. I don't care about boot camp. I have computers running Linux, Windows, and MacOS all throughout my house. (I'm a CTO / Software engineer, I have about a dozen computers in my house right now)

When you buy a product, ANY product, there's an implied agreement. I don't expect to run OSX on any old computer - it has to be an Apple; but in exchange for this limitation I expect drivers and such to be more or less a non-issue, which it pretty much always has been. (The latest OSX doesn't work on my ancient cherry 400 Mhz PPC iMac anymore... ugh) OSX is the most closed OS around - it's locked to specific hardware, there are no drivers that I can download anywhere, and it works how it works or I load in binary hacks that jeopordize the stability of the system.

Windows, on the other hand, is more open. In exchange for a bit of roughness around drivers and such, I get the opportunity to run it on anything X86. (Even newer Macs!) I don't get to modify the OS per se, but there are plenty of ports for drivers, software, etc. that extend, tweak, and refine the operations of the OS.

Linux is the most open. Everything is available to me, including sources. But I'm in the wild-wild west if I should do *anything* unusual. I can literally create my own Operating System from the ground up, line-by-line if I desire, with Linux. This degree of openness is really more than I can handle, so I make a subsequent deal with a distributor (in my case, Red Hat) to box-up the Operating System and provide a consistent experience so that I can rely on various things to be present, including drivers and such.

Counter-intuitively, the support structure for Linux is most like Macintosh - I have to make sure I have supported hardware, and if a particular piece of hardware hasn't been blessed by your particular distro, you have to resort to some weird hacks and custom-compiled software, but within that, management is a dream, and usually "just works".

For example, to load a CentOS/RedHat system from install to completely updated requires just a load, a single up2date (or yum -y update) command, and a single reboot. Raw hardware to fully updated in under an hour. MacOS is very similar. Windows takes 2 days of updates, driver downloads, and reboots. I can only use CentOS/Ubuntu with hardware on their HCL, unless I want to pull up the sleeves and spend an afternoon dickering. These qualities are much like MacOS.

From a management perspective, RedHat/Ubuntu == Apple.

Yeah

We have four or five people in a thread and it's news? Please. In addition, this is NOT A BRICKING. Bricking means it's completely inoperable. If you can reinstall, it's not bricked. Period. I also find it hard to believe that you can't archive & install if something goes wrong, or at least do the plain old install.

Re:Yeah

He is correct about it not being bricking though. As far as warnings go, it wouldn't have done any good. All updates would come with a warning that your data should be backed up and while the update was tested, it still could have unforeseen consequences. It would be like EULAs, just click because you have to. The situation though does point out that updating just because isn't always a good idea.

Re:credibility

Ahem. Their credibility really isn't an issue since they made a trivial factual claim, which happens to be correct, regarding the term of art, brick. Your own credibility has been called into question, however, by your incorrect stance over an issue you could have verified yourself in less time that it took you to type your baseless attack. If you wish to improve your credibility, spend the next hour at Wikipedia reading about logical fallacies. For extra credit, identify by name the logical fallacy you committed.

No, I'm sorry, he had a point. An Apple approved McUpdate makes the system unusable until you reinstall the entire OS. Here's something from TFA

Today, while working normally, I was "pinged" by Software Update that there were updates ready to install. I said "go ahead".

Halfway through, I received a message similar to "Software Update has encountered an unexpected issue, you must restart".

I selected restart. My machine will no longer boot (on the mac side), getting to the final (~100%) "blue line" on start up screen and than hanging.

I have tried many times (and also let it "think" for many hours) to no avail.

I just returned from the local Apple Store "Genius Bar" (a whole other story - not pleasant) where they tried to boot from CD, but the only option is to erase the entire drive and all data to do so.

This guy was sitting there working and Steve Jobs sent him a message, "We Mcwent ahead and Mcdownloaded an Mcupdate. Would you Mclike to install it and reboot-in-tosh-X?" Of course, he's gonna say yes. Now all his stuff is gone. That novel he spent all those hours at Starbucks writing... gone. That Quicktime of his little girl's first steps... gone. All that porn! That glorious, beautiful PORN!!! GONE!!!! Why? Because he trusted Steve Jobs and Apple.

So, yeah, it's not officially bricked, but only a fanboi would argue the definition to someone who has just lost everything on their hard drive. If it were a Windows update that crashed a PC, this McFanBoi would be screaming about how much Windows and Bill Gates suck and how he's so happy he does not have to worry about stuff like that because he has a Mac.

So you claim Bricking is the correct term?

And you just lost all your geek cred trying to shoot down someone who is *properly* defining what bricking really means.

Don't worry, a new UID will suit you well.

Re:Completely Overblown

"Completely overblown?"

OK, how about we change the players:

"Some XP users are having problems with the latest Windows Update, yours truly included. The problem seems to be caused by the presence of a Linux dual boot partition and renders the PC unable to reboot after the update fails. Note that Microsoft is recommending a full disk wipe; but data can be recovered via Firewire."

CNet has a note up that if you fall victim to this "known issue" and need to reformat the disk, you can't reinstall Linux because Microsoft has disallowed dual-booting with XP, so users must upgrade to Vista in order to dual-boot into Linux."

Now is it "completely overblown"? Or would you in fact be trashing Microsoft for the next 6 months over this?

OSX 10.4.11

Just reached #11 on CNET UK's "Worst Consumer Tech" list ;)

*ducks*

Re:Hmm...

No, Boot Camp before Leopard was always Beta only. You had to agree to recognize that before installing. It was originally only going to be available with Leopard, but then they decided to offer it as a Beta that you download from Apple. It never came on any macs before Leopard. You had to go download it (for free) as beta software.

Re:Hmm...

This could actually be interpreted as partly Google's fault, for raising expectations of "beta" software. Which is exactly what Boot Camp on 10.4 is: a public beta that expired quite a while ago. In particular, when the beta software also involves your boot sector and the Windows bootloader, you should consider yourself lucky to have anything recoverable. (Of course, it doesn't sound like Windows was at fault here, but nobody should be surprised when something like this breaks.)

In the case of the OP on the Apple forums, it sounds like the biggest problem was that the person had less than 1GB free space on the OS X partition. Obviously, this is only indirectly due to BootCamp, but it did stop the OP from doing an "archive and re-install" of the OS. It is interesting that one person reported that running the 10.4.11 updater under 10.5 but applied to the 10.4.10 partition works, so it isn't a completely reliable bug.

It is also worth noting that nobody has reported an actual filesystem corruption requiring a reformat, so the linked article is just plain wrong. Using the "archive and install" option to roll back the OS seems to be a reliable workaround. (With the one exception noted above.)

brick?

The term "brick [wikipedia.org]" is being bandied about pretty loosely these days. It does not mean, "I had a problem, possibly even one of my own creation, that can only be cured by re-installation, and that annoys me and I think I can get some blog hits by griping about it."

that's the Beta Bootcamp only

My 10.4.11 with Bootcamp froze for about five hours during the screen where the choice between your OSes comes up. It was just the grey background with neither hd icon showing. I thought everything was toast. Left for a while in despair and total frustration -- it wouldn't even go into OS X -- but it seemingly magically "worked itself out" after something like 5 hours. Strange. Anyway, installed Leopard immediately because Bootcamp was supposed to stop working when Leopard released anyway and my livelihood unfortunatley depends on using Windows every day on my machine.

If you read the original agreement when install Bootcamp without Leopard (ie the pre-Leopard versions of Bootcamp), it tells you it is Beta software only and that it will expire in October 2007. And that's what it did.

I installed Leopard anyway -- the full, non-beta Bootcamp (ie the one in Leopard release) has a bunch of additional features and drivers (such as for eject button, volume buttons, lots of little details that the beta did not -- it's much better -- I highly recommend Leopard to any heavy Windows users.

use rEFit

If you read the original agreement when install Bootcamp without Leopard (ie the pre-Leopard versions of Bootcamp), it tells you it is Beta software only and that it will expire in October 2007. And that's what it did.

Yep. Use this instead.
http://refit.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Meanwhile The Linux World Continues To Flounder

Microsoft and Vista a mess most people don't want to touch or deal with.

Apple and OS X becoming more and more of just another buggy OS and app vendor but with a huge markup on their prices.

Almost everyone I know want to move on to an open vendor neutral platform like Linux and yet...

* We still have to competing desktops that are only marginally different in how they fail to deliver a commercial grade user experience

* KDE klowns are still sitting around slapping each other on the back about naming everything with the idiotic K in front and doing a poor job of cloning Windows 2000

* Gnome still has Microsoft fanboys infesting open source desktops with Microsoft patent time bombs

* Open source/Linux developers still can't seem to grasp the most basic principals of font usage, UI element spacing and alignments, colour choice, and so on and instead are pointlessly trying to 'prove they are ahead' with inane 3D accelerated desktop effects no one wants

* A million sub 1.0 apps all of which do some things right and other things wrong but no single apps that actually get things people expect from commercial desktop software. And each of those open source apps depend on a hundred million crazily named library packages that are constantly getting updated.

The computing world WANTS to jump to Linux. They've been wanting to for years. They are waiting for you open source kids to finally grow up and get your shit together.

Try This Instead:

Not sure what the exact symptoms are, because no one in this thread seems to have actually experienced the issue. If its an issue where you turn the computer on, and all you get is the Apple logo and spinning gear, follow these directions:

If you have access to another Mac that is still working:

1. Put the 'broken' Mac in FireWire Disk Mode (reboot while holding down "T").
2. Attach via FireWire, the HD shows up on the desktop.
3. Download the 10.4.11 Combo update and re-install it on the "broken" Mac. Make sure its the "Combo" update. Get it by searching for "10.4.11 Combo" at apple.com/support
4. Reboot the "broken" Mac, it should just work now.

If you have a bootable external drive (always good for troubleshooting and recovery!), boot the "broken" Mac to the external drive and follow the above steps from 3.

Its actually really quick and easy to fix. Hope this helps.

Re:Try This Instead:

Ya gotta remember that the folks that this happened to are sitting around and watching Heroes tonight instead of posting comments on Slashdot because their PCs are now door stops.

And this appears to me as the wakeup call to Apple users about how Apple treats its customers - just like Microsoft. In other words you are a cash cow, your machine belongs to them and you are not allowed to do anything that Gates or Jobs doesn't want you to do and that includes experimenting with something that may be better for you but because they didn't sell it to you they will take steps to stop you from getting any use from it. Apple is just as evil as Microsoft only smaller because Jobs the AssClown decided to keep everything proprietary and Gates let his stuff work on any "standard" PC compatible hardware made by hundreds if not thousands of vendors. Apple could have ruled the world if they had licensed their hardware and software out to third party vendors or made it open source. But instead greed ruled and Apple became a niche product.

I have a 17" iMac bought one month after this guy

On that thread he says he has a 17" Macbook Pro bought 9/06, I bought my 17" iMac a month later. I was able to run Software Update from OS X 10.4.10 to 10.4.11 without incident and I also have the Boot Camp beta (1.3 to be exact). Anecdotal evidence really doesn't prove much in his case.

The thing I don't understand about his story is that he took his Macbook Pro to a Apple store genius bar and they told him his only option was a reinstall, they wouldn't tell him how to boot into target disk mode and now he's online asking how to fix this problem? Uh... I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that.

Unlicensed Software

"The license to use Boot Camp Beta expires when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is available to the public."

"Warning: Boot Camp Beta is preview software licensed for use on a trial basis for a limited time. Do not use Boot Camp Beta in a commercial operating environment or with important data. You should back up all of your data before installing this software and regularly back up data while using the software. Your rights to use Boot Camp Beta are subject to acceptance of the terms of the software license agreement that accompanies the software."

Users of Boot Camp Beta did read the terms of use, didn't they?

An interesting coincidence

I know I'll probably be modded down for this, but...

1. Apple releases a popular piece of software in beta form.
2. apple releases new operating system, in which this software is included.
3. Apple makes this software unavailable for older OS.
4. Apple releases update that borks installs of older OS's with this software, so OS must be reinstalled.
5. Apple: "Woops, sorry about that! Upgrading to Leopard for just $129 will fix this problem! Will that be cheque, credit card, debit, or money order?"

I think the correct term is

Hosed [foldoc.org] not brick [wikipedia.org]

How to make users move forward

Microsoft, listen and learn, because Apple is doing things the right way. You've released a pretty buggy, poorly designed major revision of your OS, alright, why not, but right then you release a service pack to your previous major version of your OS to make it better. This is NOT the way to go!

In order to make your users move on to your new but inferior major revision, you need to ruin the version of your OS that everyone is using. Just look at how Apple handled it. They just released a pretty buggy major revision of their OS, but it's okay! Because to make up for it they updated the previous version that everybody was using so that computers equipped with it won't even boot anymore! This way users are more than eager to move on to the new version, despite its flaws!

Steve Jobs' genius will never cease from amazing us, nor shall you cease from learning from it.

huh?

How is a problem that can be fixed with a reinstall "bricking" a mac? Bricking is when you permanently ruin something! I agree the problem is bad but it isnt that bad!

Standard reply to end users

That's what you get for trying to run Windows.

I know this will burn my karma.

Not a case of bricking.

As they're too big to be bricks.

"Boat anchoring" perhaps?

Changes in the final version of bootcamp?

I noticed a change from the final beta of bootcamp to the production version of bootcamp shipping in Leopard. It appears that windows partitioning is done differently.

In the final bootcamp beta, you could delete and recreate the windows partition during the windows installation and still have a bootable installation of windows. Not so in the new (Leopard) version of bootcamp. If you delete the partition created by bootcamp and re-create the partition using the windows installer, your new install of windows will not boot. This usually results in a "hal.dll" error.

I ran into this problem with an unattended installation of Windows XP - my answer file was configured to delete the existing windows partition and recreate / reformat the partition .

I opened a ticket with Apple support, but I haven't gotten any explanations other than a confirmation of what I observed.

-ted

Re:Apple

This seems like a rather glaring oversight. The only reason that something available previously being available only for newer versions of a product is to force someone to upgrade.

Previously only a beta version was available. When they released the final version it was included with 10.5. It would be nice if they kept the beta that worked on 10.4 available, but it is beta software and it is understandable if they don't want to deal with the support headaches. If they were shipping a real version for 10.4, then they'd have to test every new patch to OS X and see if it worked with bootcamp (which admittedly would have been nice).