MacOS XXXX!

[Karlos]

Hi,

As some of you may know I have to work with MacOS X at work. Today, during the routine copying of some files from my eMac to the server (running 10.3 Server) there was a timeout error and I had to cancel the operation.

"No big deal", I thought; the last few files were junk anyway. I then set about installing an airport extreme card in the emac used in the sales room (no untidy network cables allowed in there) and it all went swimmingy. Until I tried to connect to the server.

So, knowing the robustness and quality of MacOS X, I figured, "no bid deal, the server probably needs rebooting" - it's brainfarted once or twice in the past. Our networking guy left and in the meantime it's up to yours truly, hired as a web developer for my php/mysql/dhtml/java knowledge (I know jack about macs and not much more about networking) rather than this.

Luckily, our internet is handled by our router so the server going down is of no consequence for internet use. However there are lots of documents and user's work stored on it.

So, I went up into the loft and sure enough the G4 was sitting there with a "You need to restart your machine" message, in no less than five different languages, against a dark grey screen.

So I did. And the same screen reappeared. No matter what I did, this same screen appeared.

So I tried the safe boot. Same result. Fearing some HD invalidation, I tried booting from the OSX Server install CD to do a disk check. Still nothing...

Having consulted the manuals, online help etc. still no further on in solving it.

So I removed the HD and swapped it for another identical G4 mac and it booted fine. Said HD from server caused the twin G4 mac to fail as already described.

Getting desperate now I tried to use the server HD as a second drive to see if I could run a disk check utility then. But alas the failed HD completely inhibits the mac from functioning even when it's set up as a slave drive (and yes, I do know how to set drives up for master / slave - I'm not an average mac user :evilgrin: )

No safe boot, no boot from CD, network, USB, firewire, other HD as primary etc.

Now I know what they mean by "think different". You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.

[HopperJF]

Did you ever repair permissions while you had this machine running, or do you wait for things to go wrong first? ;-)

[Karlos]

HopperJF wrote:
Did you ever repair permissions while you had this machine running, or do you wait for things to go wrong first? ;-)

Looking after the server was not my job. The network guy was pretty vigilant about these things so I expect they were OK.

I fail to see why broken permissions om the HD should make the system totally unusable in every way, even booting from CD. Furthermore, why were they so broken in the first instance?

However, again we see the Mac paragdim here. You need to remember to fix it when it isn't broken to stop yourself getting totally screwed when it is.

Any excuse to take the blame away from the OS, eh?

You can't deny it, even windows is better behaved when there is a problem.

[kd7ota]

I like windows....  :-)

Mac...Well.....It is thinking differently...

and Amiga just RULES!  :-D  :-)



Yea, its weird how the whole OS acts up and it end up being a hard drive failure.... Thats what it was on a MAC i looked at, and had no suspition of the HD failing at all. We learn new things everyday.

[Karlos]

I fully expect the non-cooperation is deliberate. After all, how else are Mac support companies supposed to make any money?

I can see the design discussions:

Engineer Team Representive: "Well, Mr Jobbs, we eliminated most of the bugs in Panther now.."

Steve: "Ah, great great. Faster, stronger and better."

EPR: "There's only the hard fail things to finalize. We have developed a state of the art reporting tool that we can fit into the firmware and give the user a thorough diagnostic of any failure."

Steve (alarm bells ringing): "Does it give complicated output?"

EPR: "Well, it gives you a concise textual report, after all it needs to run in cases where the OS GUI services cannot be started."

Steve (anger rising): "Textual? You mean no GUI? That's bad. I mean having to soil ourselves with bash was bad enough, but expert users may need it and at least it runs after the essential cool eyecandy is started. This isn't Windows we are talking about here! What alternatives do we have?"

EPR (loosens collar slightly): "Well, we could just refuse to boot up and display a nice error picture for the same amount of bios storage space, throw in a few languages explaining there was a 'problem'..."

Steve (calming): "Yeah, go on..."

EPR: "but of course it would be about as useful as a chocolate oven tray."

Steve: "No, no, I disagree. The user doesn't need to worry about such things. After all, we do have to consider our registered support technicians, do we not?"

EPR: "I'll tell the team to go with the big power button logo and multilingual text then...."

[HopperJF]

Not particularly, repairing permissions is only a maintenance task like running ScanDisk or Disk Defragmenter on Windows...

I repaired my permissions for the first time sice I bought the machine last year, just today

[Karlos]

Are you suggesting that some bad file permissions (considering it was last "repaired" under a week ago) should be enough to bring the OS to its knees to the extend that you can't even boot from another device so long as the hard drive is attached?

If that's the case, OSX is even worse that I thought!

[mikeymike]

repairing Mac OS X is a routine task is it HopperJF?  Oops.  :-)

The last times I can remember Win2k or XP being brought to its knees (ie. not boot properly) were as follows:

1) A customer had a dying hard disk.  Bad sectors all over the place.  I needed to do a disk check in the recovery console, but hard errors obviously persisted.

2) (another customer) a dodgy USB device (because the x86 architecture doesn't sandbox USB at all, pretty stupid IMO, considering USB's basic functions, eg. hot-swap PnP) caused erratic booting.

[JetFireDX]

Check the memory in the system. If you have had one go bad on you it can make all kinds of havoc for a Mac. They are very picky about ram working or not.

Also, look online for a reference to the "secret" OpenFirmware  controls for a Mac. If you hold some odd key combinations (I think its like command-O-F) you will get into the Bios control. But be warned, you can completely screw the Mac if you change any of the wrong settings. I myself have not dabbled in it, just read about it a bit. I don't want to kill my G5 for the fun of messing around.

I would also disconnect any extra USB or Firewire devices too. Until there was a recent firmware update, my G5 1.6 would have some issues forgetting the USB was there and the mouse and keyboard would stop responding completely. Turned out that a simple fix was to use a powered USB hub, or to remove the original 256megs of Apple ram that was in the machine and just have my 2 x 512 sticks and it would behave itself. No big deal though now, a couple weeks later, Apple fixed the firmware and its been peachy ever since.

Good luck to you.

[Karlos]

@JetFire

Thanks. As it goes, I've checked the harware out - everything seems fine. It will boot from another HD containing OSX 10.3 no problem. As I said, it purely seems to be a problem with the Hard Disk or its contents.

[adz]

I've seen a few instances where Macs tend to "forget" user permissions and for some stange reason they will, on occaision, fail to load the LDAP services required to access Active Directory (multi OS network), but in this case I would be looking in the direction of the harddrive itself, as the problem moves from machine to machine, and is still present even when the drive is not used as a boot device. You might be able to mount the drive in a PeeCee running Linux and copy the contents of the drive, then download the Ultimate Boot CD and run that to check if the drive is totally stuffed.

[AmiGR]

> You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems
> that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.

Oki. I can safely assume that you never faced such a problem
under Windows then. It's a *BITCH* to solve... Same with
AmigaOS and FFS, trying to salvage all your old files.

[StormLord]

Actually I had a similar problem but the disk was electricaly defective no other machine could boot even when conected to windows XP machine.
ofcourse if you conectit to windows it will trash the RDB and you could wave bye to the disk except if disk warrior can fix it .
I work as a mac technician for about 5 years and belive me mac os classic was a nightmare for users and haven for technicians, Macos X are heaven for users and nightmare for technicians!!
anyway the OS is good behaved and that are you saing point to hardware disk failure.
X server is far from perfect but belive me is more stable that windows server and you can configure it in less that 5 minutes having open directory services DNS services 10 virtual domain with smtp,pop,imap and 100 users.
Linux is more complete because doesn't have teething problems like OS X server but you need time to learn and more time to configure this.
Anyway its always a matter of taste! I 'm using OS X to my company and OSx server(with mirror raid via hardware) and I'm using PC with windows in my home my Amiga for the most common tasks again in my home and PC with debian for router on my Access Point and Back Bone links servicing the wireless Network community here in thessaloniki.
Just find for yourself what does the job better for the time/money you have and you will have your own conclusion.

[Karlos]

AmiGR wrote:
> You need to really do that to solve the sort of problems
> that take five minutes under Windows/AmigaOS/Linux etc.

Oki. I can safely assume that you never faced such a problem
under Windows then. It's a *BITCH* to solve... Same with
AmigaOS and FFS, trying to salvage all your old files.

Wrong on both counts. Both the PC and amiga could still be booted at least. Of all the OS's I ever worked with, only MacOS X has refused to boot from any device just because there is a HD in the system that is having trouble.

[Karlos]

@Thread

Don't get me wrong, when it's working, OSX is fine. However, when it is not working it is the absolute pits!