Involuntary reboot log #3 and #4

Created , updated 2 minute read

Two kernel panics while trying to boot from a just-installed copy of Mac OS X. I won’t bother telling you what version of the OS it was…

Panic #1

Installed with all the defaults, except added the X11 package and deselected the printer drivers package. On rebooting got a kernel panic while still looking at the spinning progress indicator. Rebooted from the OS DVD and ran Disk First Aid, just to be safe.

Panic #2

Tried booting from the new install again and got another panic at the same point. Again rebooted from the DVD and ran Disk First aid, but this time picked up a problem:

Checking Catalog file.
Incorrect block count for file .store.db
(It should be 0 instead of 21)

Now, these panics would be annoying in the best of cases because of the threat they pose to the integrity of your precious data; that’s why I installed the OS on a separate partition on an external FireWire drive. But this second panic was doubly-annoying because the damaged file system wasn’t on the external (test) drive; it was on my internal drive. What was the OS doing touching that drive and corrupting it? And what good is journalling? Almost none, apparently.

So let’s tally this up: nearly two hours of time wasted rebooting, installing the OS, rebooting, panicking, rebooting, verifying, rebooting, panicking, verifying and repairing and finally rebooting again (back to my old install); and after all that I’ve achieved nothing except risking my data and littering a partition with unusable files.

Why the crash? Why nothing written to /Library/Logs/panic.log? Doesn’t the OS support booting off an external FireWire enclosure? Do you expect me to install this thing on my internal drive on my production machine? Are you nuts?

Involuntary reboot stats to date
  • Operating system version: go figure
  • Kernel panics: 4
  • Hard resets: 0
  • Total failures: 4
  • Average time between failures: 32 days
  • Uptime at moment of failure(s): Less than one minute
Leopard update

On a completely unrelated note, looks like my plans for starting some Leopard-specific development work have been postponed indefinitely. You see, to do that kind of work I’d need a machine with a bootable Leopard install on it… I wonder if Apple will provide ADC Select members with a later version of Leopard prior to it being released, or whether we’re stuck with the WWDC preview; I sure hope so, and I hope they get it to us with enough time to enable us to actually do something useful with it.

I guess I could try installing the WWDC preview on my 3-year-old laptop. Maybe that would work.