Official Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Thread & FAQ

I am surprised that Mac OS doesn't give a warning when disk access is failing. Indeed the S.M.A.R.T status is shown as OK.

The lesson seems to be that when pin-wheels are shwoing up almost everywhere it is time to back up your disk. BTW, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner for this purpose:

http://www.bombich.com/ccc_features.html
 
In this day and age where Ex-HDs are inexpensive the time to back up is as often as you can afford to lose data. In other words, if you do not get "new" stuff frequently, you can do it as often as you like.

However, with programs you can make bootable clones every day. It takes me about 15 to "smart" update my ~200 Gigs of "stuff"--where "smart" is it simply updates what is new.

Back in the day, where "back up" meant fishing around for DVDs, CDs, and, floppy disks! people could be understandably lazy. However, there really is not much of an excuse now.

The other benefit is when you frell your volume messing about, start looking for your repair disks, and other programs, you can just boot off your clone and clean your Main HD! Much easier! :)

--J.D.
 
I agree with you, Dr X.

The beauty of CCC is that it keeps an up-to-date bootable clone. I schedule mine for once-a-day at 3:00 AM. From now on I will manually clone after any significant amount of change.

If you are extremely cautious, you should make two clones on a daily, weekly, or monthly cycle and move one of the (external) drives off-site. You need to determine the frequency of recycling off-site clone disks. Clearly there is the cost factor as well but, for the wisely paranoid, the price of large disks is falling rapidly. Portable disks should be to some extent ruggedized.
 
The one I use is SuperDuper!. Do not know if it is better than CCC or if there is any difference. I got it a long time ago because Time Machine would not--back then--make a bootable clone. When you have a laptop, not having that is useless.

Now people can get too paranoid. Probably every day to every other day is more than enough. That depends on what one does. If I am working on big files like photos, or writing a paper, I am going to update it--send a copy--to my Ex-HD more frequently just to avoid problems.

It is funny, but my worship of Ex-HD came from a problem I had before I came HERE. After said back up I described--which was inspired by a PC friend who had to repair a mess and who tossed a rock at me when I asked the "did you back up your data" question--I developed what turned out to be a problem with a memory chip.

THIS can be hard to diagnose . . . can cause all sorts of problems . . . blah . . . blah. The thing is, after about the forth time of recreating everything from the DISKS I did my back up on, I finally figured out that .. . gee . . . for about $100 I could have just hooked up the Ex-HD and got everything back!

We live and learn.

--J.D.
 
I upgraded to snow leopard and now my HP All-in-One printer isn't working properly, can't scan...any suggestions?
 
New 10.6.3 Update is out!

freakingout.gif


--J.D.
 
Because therre exists a very specific problem when updating directly from 10.6.0 to 10.6.3 using the original and updated Combo updaters.

If you updated to 10.6.3 from 10.6.2 or 10.6.1 then you can disregard everything as it doesn't apply to you.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Because therre exists a very specific problem when updating directly from 10.6.0 to 10.6.3 using the original and updated Combo updaters.

If you updated to 10.6.3 from 10.6.2 or 10.6.1 then you can disregard everything as it doesn't apply to you.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, what is the problem that occurs?
 
Hi guys,

I fear I have wrecked someone's computer!
I am a professor in a third world University - no one has Macs. Except me, my wife and one student. The student was given a iBook (G3 I believe). He asked me to install Snow Leopard on it. You will know of course this does not work. However, I tried not knowing that it is not Intel and therefore SL will not work.

HELP!

I tried to do it via a firewire (iBook has no DVD player). It didn't work. Window told me that I needed to partition the disk (GUID). Which I did. His HD is wiped, Snow Leopard is not installed and now when switched on he gets the flashing blue folder/question mark.

If you can, please help!
Kind regards,
Robert.
 
r0b0 said:
I fear I have wrecked someone's computer!
Click to expand...

Probably didn't break anything, but if they had data on there they were attached to, they are going to be upset. You are going to have to find some 10.4 or older retail installers. Hopefully they have the original installers so you can at least get them to where they were before minus their data.
 
Thanks! Yes, they have all their data backed up. Sorry for a stupid question: do I simply get 10.4 or older put it in the tray and then try to boot? Any leads on where I might get my hands on 10.4. Someone told me that because it's old it is available free online somewhere...not having much look pursuing that avenue.

Many thanks!
R.
 
No Apple operating systems besides the ancient System 7.6 and previous (won't even run on the G3 iBook) are free. You cannot legally obtain Mac OS X (any version) for free, unless someone simply gives it to you (which entails a legal license transfer -- downloading off the internet does NOT meet this requirement).

Yes, simply pop the 10.4 installer CD/DVD into the drive and the machine should boot from it. You can help it along by holding the 'c' key as the computer boots, then it's a matter of clicking through a few dialogs to install Mac OS X.

If you have trouble with the installer failing to recognize the hard drive, it could be due to the GUID partition scheme you applied -- in this case, simply open Disk Utility when booted from the CD/DVD, and reformat the drive with APM or "Apple Partition Map" partition scheme, then try the install again.

Looks like you're going to be spending more than $100 on a set of 10.4 install disks:

http://lowendmac.com/deals/best-mac-os-x-tiger-prices.html

...they can be had on eBay for much less, but be warned: be very wary of what you get. If you receive gray-colored disks, more than likely, they're system-specific disks that will not be able to be used with the iBook G3. You want retail disks, which you'll have to specifically ask the seller if they are or not.
 
Thanks! Someone has bought me 10.4 CDs and are sending them from the US. I already tried to repartition (away from GUID) but I get the message "partition failed could not unmount disk".

Any ideas how I can get around that?

Thanks for all your help,
Robert.
 
Try using the terminal or disk utiliy from the install disk to manually unmount and/or repartition the disk before running the installer. From the terminal try using the umount command with sudo. Though disk utility would be a lot easier.

To use the terminal to unmount, you need to first find out what device in the dev tree represents the hard disk itself, this is not where it is mounted to but where the computer goes to access the raw disk data before it is turned to something you can use.

Type...

$sudo df

You'll see something like this...
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 1249591904 690415768 558664136 56% /
devfs 233 233 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

Find an entry that looks like the top one /dev/disk0s2. It may or may not be the same as this, but you'll notice the block numbers are huge compared to other entries, that will be your hard disk.

Then you use the command...
$sudo umount /dev/disk0s2

That should force the drive to unmount. If it doesn't, you can try adding the -f option so it would be...
$sudo umount -f /dev/disk0s2

Remember replcae /dev/disk0s2 with whatever your drive is.

I would try the terminal commands after using Disk Utility though.
 
Last edited:
Okay. I haven't yet tried sudo. I am connecting to the iBook via a firewire from my MacBook Pro. From there I access the iBook HD the disk utility and then try to partition the disk (it was partitioned originally into 9 - should i return it to 9 or is 1 fine?) that is when I get the 'can't unmount' message.

Is there a way, via Disk Utility, to unmount without partitioning?
I just wanted to check in the event that I can avoid the more complicated sudo route.

Many thanks,
Robert.
 
I don't see any reason for 9 partitions. One should be just fine. And yes, there is a way to tell Disk Utility to unmount the disk, should be in the right clicking context menu or in one of the menus in the menu bar. I don't have my Mac in front of me right now so I can't check.
 
Thanks. I found the right clip command for 'unmount'. I got the following message: "Unmount Failed. The disk 'Macintosh HD II' could not be unmounted. Make sure that all applications and files are closed on this disk."

Thanks for your patience and kindness on this one!
R.
 
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