The ScooterBlog

Rarely is any love posted for an OS crash on any forum ever, but I’m about to give Apple some love for their ability to recover. Here’s how the story goes:

So I was sitting ay my desk at work, working on stuff and updating my Panther OS to 10.3.4, and as it’s “writing files” on the upgrade, it goes to the screen saver and locks up …. go to reboot, and it locks, never boots again, go to verbose mode and it stops at the IP Firewall extension and goes no farther. So here I am, at work, in panic, and thinking I may have lost my 2 gig home directory … but have no fear.

OSX has an option called “Archive & Install” for it’s Panter and Jaguar OS systems. Basically, it’s like re-installing Windows on a new directory, except it does it in a much more streamlined fashion. It allows you to take your old home directory and bring it to the new OS install like nothing happened, keeps all your applications installed, and hopefully (they don’t guarantee perfection) no application issues.

So I give it a go, install Panther, and it works … I have my old user set in place and the files look good. I went ahead and ran Software Update for all the standard updates, and then ran the standalone combined 10.3.4 update, and it worked great. The only things I had to re-install were Palm Desktop and the iSync Palm Conduit … not bad, not bad.

Find me a Windows install that in 3 hours is back to full usage!