Steff.me

Despite having upgraded my iMac to Mac OS X 10.4.9 the day it was released, I hadn’t noticed any problems until today. That said, I hadn’t tried to do anything with my iMac bar browse the web, watch podcasts and play with PHP. So it came as a slight shock when I tried to open a disk image to receive a “Broken pipe” error. At first I put it down to a faulty application but after trying again and again with various other applications I realised something was up.

Googling (first time I’ve typed that word and I find it odd it didn’t throw a spell-check error) the error I found a slew of other people with the same problem. Apparently, during the upgrade to 10.4.9 when “Optimize System Performance” appears on the screen you are not to touch anything or your computer will die a horrible death. Really, don’t touch it. More information on this ridiculous problem can be found in this Unsanity article, Shock and Awe.

The article describes how to solve the problem if you just so happen to be affected by it. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t overly helpful. I don’t have another Intel Mac lying around that allows me to run the combo 10.4.9 updater off to re-upgrade my machine. You can’t just run the updater as it is, as with this problem you can’t open a disk image.

My solution to this problem was to download the combo updater from Apple to my PowerBook and burn it via Disk Utility (Images -> Burn -> Select the combo disk image). This burns it as an image rather than just putting the .dmg file on the disk, so my iMac could see the contents and run the update.pkg file. After re-upgrading to 10.4.9 my iMac booted and works perfectly.

Lesson learned: do not touch a damn thing during the upgrade process.