I thought I would chronicle some weirdness that happened with one of the G5's we have at work. A graphic artist left the machine to download and install the latest update (Security Update 2006-005, iTunes 7.0.1) last night and when she got to work this morning clicked the restart button the machine restarted but no application would open! It would ask the user to authenticate and then throw an error. Basically, Finder was the only application that worked -- which actually made it nice to be able to back things up. Well, System Preferences worked too so we went in and determined that the two user accounts on the machine (10.3) were now just Standard acounts. There was no longer any Adminitrator account and the users had lost priviledges to nearly everything useful.
First thing we did was connect an external drive and copy over all the files that were probably already on the most recent backup but it's better to be safe... Then we just attempted to do a reinstall using the 10.3 install discs we have here at the office -- booting from the CD would panic the machine everytime, which I don't understand. So, we decided to try and boot the install CD from a different (functioning) G5 and install the OS via Firewire Target Mode... and the installation CD locked up the other G5 too. I switched to another copy of the install CD and it locked up too... so I figure the bad G5 is jinxed! I am, however, able to wipe the drive just in case there was something fishy going on with it, but it had no positive effect as we tried another time on the install CD and got the same locking issue.
On to greener pastures -- I decided to clone the drive using CCC and -- surprise -- it works like a dream. Three cheers for Firewire and Bombich Software.
