I had been going really well for a long time. I have had no computer problems for months now. Then, in the span of 24 hours, I managed to kill two computers by not doing anything out of the ordinary. What’s amazing is that the two computers in question were both Macs.
I first hosed the karaoke machine (the “computer” which is just an external bootable hard drive, currently living on my G4 cube) by trying to use the command-line software upgrade, but then not finishing the process. At least I think that’s what caused it. The problem was that the Finder would keep starting up, then crashing, then starting up, then crashing. I had to reinstall the OS (in the wee hours of the morning, of course), but it seems to be working now.
Then the very next day, I was playing with my Powerbook, and I tried booting into OS 9. I got a flashing question mark disk icon, so I tried switching back, but it wouldn’t let me. I tried booting to my hardware test disk, but it couldn’t mount the drive. The next morning, I called Apple tech support, and in the process ended up using the Disk Utilities that come on the 10.3 install disk, which did find the disk and enabled me to switch the startup disk back. What frightens me about this is that there is now the possibility for putting my laptop into a state where it can’t be fixed if I don’t have a specific CD with me.
Gasp!
Windoez users like myself have lived with that need of contingency for years now.
It is indeed a pain to run a dual boot system, but it’s necessary if you’re incremental in upgrading the rest of your software, like I am.
I have tons of stuff that worked fine in 922, but I just had to get the Flash and Dreamweaver MX 2004. Now I have to switch back and forth all the time, since I got used to all the new net stuff, but I still have Pagemaker and Photoshop 5.5 in heavy rotation.
This really wasn’t dual-boot… it was two folders on the same HD. I just haven’t updated my 9.2 install for so long, I think it might have been missing something.
And I have the benefit of being almost all OS X; PageMaker is the only OS 9 application I think I have left, and I haven’t needed it in a long time, and it works decently well in Classic mode.
Hmm…. now that I think of it, I might have forgotten to bless the OS 9 system folder when I upgraded my HD. Oh well, not worth bothering with now.
I’ve been using for OS X exclusively for so long (I don’t even use Classic anymore), but there was this one program I wanted to try that had to run in OS 9, wouldn’t even work in Classic.
The fact that I haven’t used it in so long is probably why this problem occurred.
Scheffler Field strikes again, eh? *patpat* Sorry you had a big surge of computers poofing.
We got alot of lazy people in this world.. or people who’s stubbernly do not like changes.. thats why you got guys who runs their cars till they’re dead without maintainces like even simple oil changes.. :/