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June 05, 2004
google makes me a guru!!
so, i decided to upgrade my mac cube to the latest OS.
one of the many unique things about the cube is, there's no mechanical way to force it to eject a cd-rom. there are quite a few software methods of ejecting, including a particularly hairy one that i just used successfully.
i decided to erase the hard drive completely during the upgrade. the previous owner had left some software behind that i didn't care for and couldn't uninstall. the iTunes install had also become corrupted. i wanted a clean slate.
the install program hung during erasure of the disk (i believe).
i was able to erase the disk with the disk utility-- but then the OSX upgrade cd that i was currently booted off of wouldn't install an OS... because it's an upgrade cd.
i typed, "eject disc from cube" into google. the first result had my answer.
boot into open firmware and type "eject cd".
booting into open firmware is pretty exciting. it's like booting a UNIX system that has no GUI installed. lots and lots of scary text scrolls down the screen, and finally a little command prompt shows up:
>
well, it worked. and handily, OF supplied the command for shutting down ("shut-down", imagine that!). i shut down and booted off of my original OSX install disc, which seems to be happily installing away right now.
Posted by lisa at June 05, 2004 06:13 PM | TrackBack
Comments
go you!
Posted by: georg on June 5, 2004 09:36 PM
unfortunately, i seem to now have gone into "all computers i touch will now die or at least have a kernel panic" mode.
i had to start with OS 9.1 on the cube and have upgraded successfully through three or four systems, only to get a kernel panic when i tried to boot off my jaguar upgrade disc.
i also came home to find my icebook spinning during bootup (i don't actually remember rebooting it); it wouldn't boot off of disk so i booted off a cd-rom. i am now running disk repair on it for the second time; we'll see.
have a feeling i'll be using google a bit more before the night is through. i'm afraid to touch the powerbook, really, at this point.
Posted by: lisa on June 5, 2004 09:45 PM
Excellent!
Your whole venture sounds like it could have been written into a sci/fi or action flick where the end result is lives saved and disaster averted, all via our star dialing from a PDA into a presumed-dead military satellite that has code that can be hacked to stop accidental deployment of the MX missle, and the start of World War III. Starring Lisa Linn. :-)
Posted by: Phil on June 6, 2004 04:00 PM
the excitement continues, for those of you following along breathlessly from home...
i couldn't get the cube to boot off of any more upgrade cd's... i've determined that the cd-rom drive is dying. dave reminded me that he'd saved a similar situation by turning his ipod into a bootable firewire disc drive. i am right now attempting to boot off the ipod (we'll see.. it's taking a loooooong time) and if that works, i've made disk images of the installers for the upgrades i want.
the hard drive in the ibook definitely has severe problems. norton disk doctor hung while trying to scan the drive, so now i am trying techtools pro.
yeah, i really should not have told georg last night that things were going well.
Posted by: lisa on June 6, 2004 05:55 PM
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.