Wesley's Tool-Box

This morning saw Apple announcing the first official Macintosh computers with Intel CPU such as the MacBook Pro. These machines come with OS X 10.4.4 for Intel, and Apple updated the PPC version of OS X to the same version. I downloaded the update and ran it... and the system wouldn't boot anymore.

The keyboard commands to force booting to the optical drive refused to work, so I had to take the Mac mini apart, physically remove the hard disk, and force it to boot from the OS X install DVD. After that, I set the boot drive to the optical drive, turned the system off, reassembled it back to the way it was, and started installing OS X 10.4 from scratch. Using the archive-and-install option, the old installation was saved for later recovery of data.

After that, I checked the previous installation's folder to retrieve as much files as I can that did not automatically get transferred already. This included all the server data and some application files. I reconfigured the server with the latest MySQL (5.0.18) and PHP (5.1.1) binaries. A bit of problem still hung around until just now, but I was able to fix it. All the installed applications were run to check that they were still working right. Everything is back to normal, I think.

On a related note, while I was trying to fix the server problem, I found thatthis IP loopback issue does not occur anymore (probably because I'm using a different router now), and if I try the fix despite this, it completely kills network connectivity. So anyone reading that should exercise caution.