d–x–x–x+

Computer:~ GG5$ cd /volumes
Computer:volumes GG5$ lsl
total 8
drwxrwxrwt@ 6 root admin 204 Dec 19 07:24 ./
drwxrwxr-t 48 root admin 1700 Dec 5 22:17 ../
d--x--x--x+ 3 root admin 102 Dec 14 23:09 Gigabyte/
drwxr-xrwx 25 GG5 GG5 918 May 10 2012 Gigabyte 1/
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 19 06:47 Lemon@ -> /

Computer:volumes GG5$ umount gigabyte
umount: gigabyte: not currently mounted
Computer:volumes GG5$ mount gigabyte
mount: gigabyte: unknown special file or file system.

This is a *ghost drive* generated by unknow forces in Mac OS X. Because the real volume has been renamed (a suffix was added) access to it by automated programs is prevented. The solution is to delete the ghost drive.

Dealing with Mac OS X Volume Suffixes

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Leopard Warning!

Beware of switching from Tiger to Leopard.

All your Classic applications will become useless.  You won’t be able to open some of your old documents!

And, you’ll find a sidebar showing up in every finder window.  The option for hiding it permanently (along with the tool bar) appears to be working now, but you will have to turn it off on a window by window basis, by clicking the little button in the upper right of the window.

Performa 6400 Trouble

It only boots up to where it shows the date in the upper right, then locks the cursor.

I’ve tried booting from CDs with systems 7.6.1, 8.5, 9.1, and every boot key combination including zap pram, with same results.

Sometimes the boot volume will show in the upper right, including the first partition of the internal hard drive.

Sometimes Disk First Aid runs and says it’s fixed but still, just a blank screen, maybe one icon, the time, and a frozen cursor.

Must be some chip burned out but I keep wondering if it’s software planned obsolescence. The machine is dated 10/23/96! Hate to give it up. I use it for SCSI Drivers and its Audio-Visual capabilities.

Complaints!

1) My keyboard often produces double strikes like thiis. In System Preferences, setting Delay Until Repeat to Long doesn’t solve the problem!

2) Apple Mail: Point, press, drag and release the mouse cursor over the messages. This action will sometimes move one message, and at other times simply select a batch of messages. It seems there is NO consistency, but eventually, with patience, persistence, and experimentation, I figured out what is going on. So, my complaint now is that this message-selection-move process isn’t covered in the Help menu.

3) Spotlight: Yeah, cool, shows everything and then some, more than needed. It’s infinitely configurable, of course, but I just want to simply find the file I happen to know the name of. How do I make it work like the straight-forward Find utility of yore? And why should I even have to ask that question? Shouldn’t a simple file-name find be the default configuration until I actually need all those bells and whistles?

4) As long as I’m on this tirade, remember in those days of yore when inserting a diskette of an unrecognized format provoked a dialog box asking if you wanted to REFORMAT! Who’s the blankety-blank who came up with that stupid idea? I know it’s ruined some lives!

Mac OS X passwords

The three to concern yourself about:

Admin

The primary user’s password. Gives access to the entire system, except the private areas of any secondary users.

Master

Makes it possible for hapless secondary users to reset their own passwords. Note: Don’t forget this one because it can’t be re-created!

User

Secondary users need their own password to log on, giving them restricted access to their part of the system.

Off Like A Jet!!!

After doing Software Update to take it from 10.4 to 10.4.9, the Mac went into the spinning-daisy-icon mode for a long time. I just walked away from it for an hour. The screen was blank when I got back to it, presumably in sleep mode. Clicking the space bar sounded familiar, like it was coming to life, but the screen remained black and the fan started running faster and faster and louder and louder until it was a scream! I held down the power button to shut it down.

Back on again, the first thing I did was look in the log:

Applications > Utilities > Console

It said mdimportserver crashed(?). Maybe it’s something to do with Spotlight Indexing.

Sighting the Tiger

Upgrading to 10.4 went smoothly, the whole process taking about 20 minutes. It started by checking the installation disk, then verifying the destination volume before copying lots of files from the Mac OS X Install DVD. After Optimizing System Performance, it restarted automatically from the new system’s boot partition.

The first thing I noticed was that new files (screen shots I took during the registration process) weren’t going automatically into the lower right corner of the desktop. Also, there was a new icon inserted into the dock, Dashboard.

I had to check email first. My DSL connection worked fine. Mail was just as I left it.

Next I had to see if it would recognize a blank DVD, and it did! That was one of my problems in Panther. Another problem was Help in Terminal, and that was okay. I’m going to bed now, it’s 1:51 AM.

Tiger creeps up on Panther

I’ve notice that Terminal in my Panther system has a different prompt and is not giving me the help and man pages it used to. Something needs to be reset and I don’t feel like looking for it. Maybe I’ll just switch to Tiger and forget about getting Panther back to where it was. Friends have been suggesting that since Tiger first came out, but I hesitated to install it then because, until now, nothing was broke.

Spotlight and Dashboard look interesting, too, by the way.

Piecing it Together Again

Rebuilding the system, from the disks that came with the G5, without also reinstalling the bundled software, proved a mistake. I had just finished doing all the online updates going from 10.3.5 to 10.3.9 (required for Filemaker 8.5), when I noticed blank cds weren’t being recognized. I had to go back again to those system disks to reinstall iDVD, but mistakenly reinstalled 10.3.5 again. Let me warn you, this is TOO easy a mistake to make!

Then I had to do what Adobe calls a HotFix for Dreamweaver. Then reinstall Xcode, Stuffit, and Adobe Reader.

Alas, now my printer wouldn’t work. Turns out the reactivation secret is to access the hidden print driver installer by using “Go to Folder…” in the Finder (at least I learned one new thing during this debacle):

Finder > Go > Go to Folder > /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/HewlettPackardPrinterDrivers.pkg

turn on printer
Printer Setup Utility

Shell Script to Compare Installations

I wrote a little shell script to run in BBEdit. It creates a uniquely named text file containing the names of all/most of the files in my system library folder. It uses the ls command with the -AR option to recursively list subdirectories encountered. I call it CatSysLib.sh:

#!/bin/sh
cd /System/Library
theDate=`date '+%y%m%d%H%M%S'`
destPath="/Volumes/Cornucopia/Catalogs"
theCat="$destPath/$theDate.txt"
ls -AR > $theCat
exit 0

By comparing the new system with the old one that didn’t work, I discovered an odd extention: LexarFilterScheme.kext.

A Google search revealed that THIS was the cause of my DVD not playing commercial titles, to wit:

“One of our readers, has reported to us an incompatibility issue rather annoying between the Secure II software found in USB key from Lexar and MacOSX. Indeed, once the software is installed on the Mac, it becomes absolutely impossible to play any DVD (backup or movie DVD).”

I made sure not to reinstall that security software and used Disk Utility to reformat the flash memory of the Lexar JumpDrive.

Note: In the script above, the first line starts with a two character “shebang” which is a word formed from a corrupted combination of the number sign (hash) and the exclamation point (bang), kind of like the word “blog” is from web log.