Hello hello, it's certainly been a while since I've posted here.
Reason I'm posting is to tell everyone that the 10.3.8 update caused some serious trouble with my PowerBook. I reinstalled Mac OS X a few days ago (before 10.3.8 was released) to make it easier for me to clean up all of the useless crap that has accumulated on my hard drive. I made sure I made a bootable backup everything onto my external hard drive. I downloaded the combined 10.3.8 update that was supposed to update my machine from the current 10.3.4 (which was the version that came on my PowerBook Restore CDs). I pushed the install button, typed my admin password, and let it do it's magic. I left it alone while it was updating and went to work on some assignments. About an hour later, I came to check on it, and it seemed to be stuck at the "Installing Update" part of the process, with the spinning beachball keeping it company. I thought to myself "Hmmm...now this is odd...", so I watched it for a few minutes to see if any progress whatsoever was made. None took place, so I clicked back to the Finder (the only other application that was open) to see if the whole machine was locked into the beachball. It seemed fine at first, but when I moved my cursor to the dock it became apparent that the dock was frozen and out of commission. Then the Finder locked up too. At this point, I was like "Well s***, this ain't cool!" It also wouldn't respond to keyboard commands, including the Volume and Brightness buttong.
I left it for a few more minutes, to no avail, and decided I should restart it and hope for the best. On startup, my PowerBook ran into a kernel panic, which didn't surprise me one bit. I restarted again just to make sure it wasn't a freak occurance, and there was another kernel panic. (BTW, this is the first kernel panic I've EVER witnessed under Mac OS X, after using it since 10.1 was released on everything from an old 500MHz iMac to my current PB G4) I popped in my Mac OS X Software Restore CD, and installed another copy of Mac OS X.3.4 on the hard drive, with the 'broken' system being thrown into a "Previous Systems" folder. That's what I'm running off now, and everything seems fine. All of my files and a bootable system are still on my external hard drive, so there's no worries
I'm running Mac OS 10.3.4 on a 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook that I bought back in August for university. It's the Combo-drive model, shipped stock. It still has only the 256MB of RAM that it came with, though I mean to triple it sometime in the next month or so. While updating to 10.3.8 (well, trying to, anyway), the only thing that was plugged into my PB was the power plug. I have an Airport Express wireless network that I use here, that was turned on and broadcasting internet access for the whole process, if that makes any differrence.
Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions? How bad have I screwed up?
