Well, it’s nearly Christmas, and I have, if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, been having a spot of bother with my machines lately. After a drop that the Eee would normally survive, it mysteriously stopped working (I think it is either a problem with the screen’s power, or a BIOS issue. Either way, it’ll be difficult to fix.)
Never fear, I thought, as I reached over to boot up the iMac. To my horror, Tiger wouldn’t boot, hanging at the blue screen with a sporadic throbber, leaving me without a UNIX machine - and meaning that to fix it, I would have to resort to the horror of using a Windows Vista machine to find a fix.
My first job was to isolate the issue, which, as booting into verbose mode (Command and V at the startup chime - for a list of more of these handy shortcuts, see here) told me, was that coreservicesd kept crashing at boot with a segmentation fault. Googling told me that rebuilding the launch services register might help, so I ran the following command from single-user mode:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
However, this also exited with a segmentation fault. This created a problem - I couldn’t rebuild the LaunchServices register without lsregister, meaning that my OS X installation was effectively bricked.
The simple way out, as it were, would be to reinstall OS X. The major problem with that is that I didn’t have access to an OS X install DVD at the time, leaving my only option to find a hard drive with OS X installed on it, and to swap it in.
I eventually managed to find an old 6gB drive from a Power Mac G3 with a copy of Tiger on it. It worked. Although the screw was a little tough, and the hard drive takes a bit longer to spin up, the machine now works like a dream.
With all this in mind, I nearly forgot that it’s Christmas Eve. There’s very little I can say at 22:45, with only 75 minutes to go until the event, without sounding ineptly slow and out of date. All I can summon up the typing energy to do at this late hour is to wish all my readers, and the blogosphere, a very happy and peaceful yule. Have a good one.
