On Friday morning I installed the Mac OS X 10.4.10 system update. One crash and a reboot later my keyboard and track pad weren't responding to input essentially rendering my MacBook Pro useless. Plugging in an external keyboard and mouse didn't help either. I'm back up and running now thanks to a standalone update package Stuart found for me. I'm posting this incase anyone else has the misfortune of suffering the same problem. Here's the steps it took to fix:
- Rebooted from a firewire drive containing a backup of Mac OS X (once again, thanks Stuart). To select a different boot volume hold down "alt" when booting.
- Once up and running used Super Duper to back up my entire hard drive to an external USB 2 hard drive (I only had a back up of my files, not my full system).
- Downloaded and ran the "Mac OS X 10.4.10 Combo Update" DMG which contains all updates to Mac OS X since 10.4. This package is really cool because it let's you specify a target volume (it doesn't have to be the one the computer is currently booted from).
- Rebooted from my internal drive - success!
The Combo package for both Intel and PowerPC systems is listed in this MacFixIt article as well as the full set of steps to run through.
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/675 has an article on the problem as well. Starting up in safe mode should help. Didn't experience problems myself though.
Maybe i'm lucky, but my MacBook Pro still working good after 10.4.10 update.
matthijs - unfortunately in my case it didn't work in safe mode either.
Sorry to hear that Eliot. Glad you got it sorted in the end. But still, this is not the usual upgrade process we are used to with mac, isn't it?
Good tip about holding down the alt to boot from a different volume. I have a complete clone of my HD, but never actually tried to boot from it.
My current backup strategy is a combination of Deja Vu for daily backups and and super duper for periodic clones.
I downloaded and installed Mac OS X 10.4.10 update and just as i was working the screen went down on bright and a message appeared in the middle of the screen in english, spanish, french and japanese; it said something that i should turn off my computer by pressing the power button for a couple of seconds... etc...
This had never happened to me until i downloaded that update; later i downloaded and installed Mac OS X 10.4.10 COMBO Update and the problem seems to be fixed but i'm not sure though... any ideas?
For anyone applying the combo-update having booted from an external drive be sure to right click the volume that you will be running the update against, select 'get info' and then tick the 'Ignore ownership permissions' before you run the update.
This 10.4.10 update brakes UNO too. Guess .10 has never happened before, huh. Must be something to do with version checking.
I downloaded and installed Mac OS X 10.4.10 update and just as i was working the screen went down on bright and a message appeared in the middle of the screen in english, spanish, french and japanese; it said something that i should turn off my computer by pressing the power button for a couple of seconds... etc... It is On Compaq presario X1000 Notbook,1.5g,1g ram,64mb ATI 9700 agp.
I have exactly the same problem than you Eliot. I'm going to apply that you proposed.
I was lucky enough to have a very very old clone of my system. But reinstalling everything doesn't suit me.