raider_red's Journal: Joining the Cult, Part 2: Trouble on the way to Paradise

I got home from the Office about 6, after stopping at Comp USA to get a bag for the new PowerBook. I gently worked my way through the packaging, and unbundled the new machine. After plugging it in on my dining room table, I made a cursory inspection of the documentation. Nothing too complex.

I powered the machine up for the first time, and was greeted with a friendly startup screen, followed by a series of setup dialogs. After navigating through these, I was dumped into the Mac OS X desktop. (Nirvana!) It also immediately found my wireless access point, so I didn't have to run an Ethernet cable to the router.

But trouble was just around the corner. After this first startup, the Mac immediately launched system update. It downloaded about 120 MB of updates, including the gargantuan 80 MB 10.3.5 update. While all of these were installing, I decided to do something useful, and popped open Safari to get a fresh copy of Mozilla Firefox. When I attempted to install this at the same time the system updater thingy was optimizing my hard drive, I got an evil dialog which read "Your system needs to be restarted, please press and hold your power button." I did as it instructed, and when I tried to power back up, the system wouldn't boot. Realizing after about ten minutes that I was a little out of my depth, I called tech support, where I was placed on hold. Not being one to be put off from geekly pursuits, I put tech-support-hold on the speaker phone, and grabbed the one DVD which was packaged with my machine-- which had a brief instruction for running hardware diagnostics. After 15 minutes on hold, I had come to the conclusion that my boot drive was fucked. At this point, I went to get a Coke, and ruminate. As I came to the end of my rumination, I was finally forwarded to a tech-support guy. After a brief discussion, we agreed that yes, my boot drive was fucked. (As an aside, I found the guy at Apple, named Robert, to be quite good, unlike a lot of the first levels at SBC or Dell.) The next step was to reinstall the OS off that same DVD. Thirty or forty minutes later, I had a running system again, which in turn, wanted to run system update. This time it ran successfully, and I now have a beautiful functioning powerbook.

Since then, I've installed my wireless mouse, MS Office, and Firefox. I'm enjoying this. I'll write more later.