My mac mini appears to be dead :(

[aphex]

Came home from a HELL of a horrible day to find my Mac Mini going into a kernel panic as soon as it starts booting OSX.

Tried a Repair Disk, no luck.

Anyway to reinistall the OS only?

 

[aphex]

btw, i think my power went out for about 3 hours... I have a UPS backup connected to the mini, but i have a feeling it didnt shut down as it was supposed to.

 

[Kaido]

First question, did you install the recent 10.4.10 update? Next, did you try any of the following:

-unplug the Mini and replug it in? (basic power cycle)
-reset SMC?

You can also try resetting the PRAM if those fail, PM for details.

 

[aphex]

yep, power cycled twice, no luck.

had the update installed but i've rebooted 2-3 times since then.

Gonna try SMC and PRAM now...

 

[kalster]

do you have a way to boot from the repair disk and fire up disk utility, if so try and repair permissions on the disk osx is installed on

 

[aphex]

Well i'll be, it was that update Kaido mentioned. WTF? Why would it crap out now?

All good now!

Thanks!

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: aphex
Well i'll be, it was that update Kaido mentioned. WTF? Why would it crap out now?

All good now!

Thanks!

What did you do to fix it, the SMC reset? Just in case anyone else has that problem

 

[Kaido]

<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: aphex
Well i'll be, it was that update Kaido mentioned. WTF? Why would it crap out now?
</end quote></div>

Despite Apple's illusion of everything being peachy-keen, nearly every one of their updates is plagued with problems initially. 10.4.10, among other things, caused the audio to pop on a number of machines. I've also read of it "killing" other machines, similar to your situation. The trick to get around this is simply to wait a week or two to see what the bugs are and to see if Apple releases a small follow-up patch. Forums are a good place to learn of bugs, but MacInTouch and Accelerate Your Mac usually have compiled reports that are useful:

http://www.macintouch.com/

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

For example, I did a search on MacInTouch for "10.4.10" which brought up the user experiences here:

http://www.macintouch.com/read...cosx10_4_10/index.html

People with all types of Macs send it their reports and weather the update is working properly or not, along with what problems they are specifically having. Just by quickly scanning the experiences you can see reports of audio problems, problems with certain USB Printers, and so on. If the problem gets really big you will probably see it on Engadget. The Unofficial Apple Weblog documents major problems as well:

http://www.tuaw.com/

You can setup RSS feeds with the majority of these sites and then quickly browse the latest entries daily or weekly to see if there are any problems before updating. It's also good to have SuperDuper update your clone file on an external hard drive before updating so that you can recover the pre-updated system without any hassle. It's a bit of work setting this up (RSS feeds & dumping the initial clone file), but if something catastrophic happens like in your case it can be a real lifesaver at the cost of pushing the backup button in SuperDuper before you run System Update.