Archive for May, 2007

Hallelujah!

Published by Yuletide on May 13, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

I have worked a miracle!!! From the threads I posted on the help BBS’s…

Blue Screen of Death & Can’t Reinstall OSX?! Help!!
Hey everyone,
Critical Info:
Machine: MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz 2GB RAM
OSX 10.4.9 with all latest updates, then 10.4.8 combo installer over that

So, I managed to really screw up my whole system, and then in the process of trying to fix it, made it much worse. The last thing I did was use Pacifist to install the 10.4.8 combo update over my 10.4.9 system. (Initially my problems stemmed from stupidly running Monolingual). It went fine, but when I went to reboot, it froze at a light blue screen (before showing the “MacOS” loading bar…) I tried booting in safe mode… no dice

I started up off the OSX Install discs that came with the machine, and was hoping to do an archive and install… But then the installer loaded, thought for a while, and gave me an error message: “Alert: This software cannot be installed on this computer.” with two buttons, “Startup Disk” and “Restart”. I tried setting the startup disk to the install cd, but it just repeated the whole process again. And I ran disk utility just for giggles (no problems to repair).

SO, I guess the only thing I can imagine working short of a complete erase-volume-and-reinstall (which would be not-good since I don’t have a recent backup… If I had to I guess I’d mount this HD via FW on another machine and back stuff up that way, but thats a last resort) would be somehow to mess around in Terminal to either a) Force the install, or b) Fix things enough that the Apple installer will behave itself.

I tried briefly to get Pacifist to open via the command line, but it complained that the commandline tools it needed were missing. Next step would be to reconfigure the PATH variable to include my HD (right now its using the CD) so Pacifist can find the tools?

SO, as of right now my machine is Kaput!!! Any advice?!

And my final triumph:

Hallelujah! I have worked a miracle!!!
I decided to try one last thing… I had already downloaded the 10.4.9 combo update (tried installing that one first, when that didn’t fix things I went to 10.4.8… etc..)

Anyways, booting from the CD,
I used Disk Utility to mount the combo update DMG, then quit Disk Utility and opened terminal to run installer.app (included on the dvd) >>/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Installer
Then I navigated to the install package on the mounted 10.4.9 image and… it installed!!! And then booted normally!
I have no idea why the update would install and not a fresh install of OSX, but at least the machine works now!

ANyways, I’ll prolly still do an archive and install just-in-case.

I love when stuff like this works!

[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

Fixing the Damage from Monolingual: SMB error -50…

Published by Yuletide on May 12, 2007 in OSX and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

So I found a few threads on the net that described similar problems and how to fix them… Basically, due to either the latest Apple security update, or my running Monolingual, there was a conflict between the mount_smbfs and smbfs.kext versions. The solution? Use your OSX disc to extract and reinstall the previous version of the smbfs Kernal extension (1.6 rather than 1.7).
The problem? I don’t have my disc with me here at school.
The solution? Use the 10.4.8 combo updater. (It worked!)

I wasn’t sure which to update, so I went ahead and reinstalled smbfs.kext and AppleSMBios.kext, and I reinstalled mount_smbfs just for good measure.

Then, after a restart, I get an Error -36 blah blah could not be read or written…
Wtf?
After checking the Console, I saw this error message:
mount_smbfs: /sbin/kextload command failed, exit status 1: Operation not permitted
mount_smbfs: SMB filesystem is not available
Now, the ingenious bit that made me feel like a l337 h4rdc0r3 h4xx0r…
>>sudo /sbin/kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext appears to be valid
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext loaded successfully
The -t is just to print diagnostics…
So now it works!!! Yay!
Now, why couldn’t it load the kext on its own? That, I don’t understand. Maybe the SMBios thing shouldn’t have been reverted? I’ll try putting back the old (newer) version and see what happens…

But at least I can mount my shares again!

Update: I replaced the SMBios thing, but I think what ended up fixing it was that I went into /System/Library/Filesystems/SMB.fs/ and edited the plist files to match the version I had rolled Samba back to (1.3.6). Or something. I know I messed around with SMB.fs, since the error above says “filesystem unavailable” which meant there was something funky goin on with SMB.fs…. (what help I am… ! But hey, its late and I have two finals due tomorrow…. AHHHHHH)

Update: So everything turned out fine, and I didn’t even have to do an archive and install! What did I do? I borrowed a friend’s MacBook Pro install discs and forced it to “update” my installatin of osx. The initial installer app runs a test to see if it can install Tiger, which my computer failed. So, I had to dig into the installer and select the package manually, and install from there (this is after having started up from the cd). I believe I had to use the command line to actually open Installer.app so I could install it manually, but I forget. And pacifist doesn’t work in that context because a bunch of stuff it needs aren’t loaded. So after installing over things, and then perhaps also using Pacifist to do some more forced installing for selected directories that were suspected of giving errors earlier, just to be safe, everything was back to normal. Yayyyy!
[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]

Exporting from Zotero to RefWorks

Published by Yuletide on May 7, 2007 in Software, Troubleshooting and Web Applications. 0 Comments

FINALLY I got it to work. Since Zotero’s been CRASHING on my ass, I decided to export my ridiculous bibliography over to Refworks, which is web-based and clumsy, but at least it doesn’t crash Word.

  1. So export your stuff from Zotero as BibTeX format (I tried lots of formats and this method works best).
  2. Open the resulting file in some text editor that allows for Regular Expression search and replace.
  3. Then run this query:

    4. Search for: \n},
    Replace with: \n} (no comma)

  4. Then save, and import the file into RefWorks as a Bibtex file with the default options (I selected UTF-8 for good measure)

While i’m on this topic I might as well continue my delirium and show the regex for converting from Ottobib BibTeX (Who knew there were so many kinds!?) to Zotero-importable BibTeX.
Search for: '(.*)'
Replace with: {$1}
Yay.

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