So, less than a year after discussing the subject in detail on my own website, I finally got burned by a momentary lapse of reason electricity.
I’ve been holding off on updating the iMac DV that serves as my gateway to the home network for some time, skipping over Mac OS X v10.4.6 until a few annoying bugs could be resolved. Apparently, 10.4.7 does the trick, so tonight I decided to throw it on the iMac. And sure enough, before it could finish installing, the power flickered just enough to trip the machine (it’s more sensitive than most of the others). [Expletive]!
I wandered out to the table where it sits, hoping it might just have been optimizing, the install itself actually complete. Nope.
Due to the nature of the 10.4.6 update, two restarts are actually required for the process to finish. The iMac hung after powering itself back on, so I manually powered it off and back on. This time, it got to the desktop, but About This Mac still shows the system version as 10.4.5. Uh-oh.
To make matters worse, opening Safari or Software Update only resulted in a crash of each, under both the non-admin account normally logged in, and the local administrator account I set up for maintenance. And, of course, my only 10.4 DVD is at work.
So, I’ve turned it off for now, and over the weekend, I suppose I’ll be performing an Archive and Install and hoping for the best. Grrrr.
I believe the moral of the story has something to do with uninterruptable power supplies and the people who (don’t) use them, but it’s too early in the morning for such thoughts…
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