I updated my Mac Pro Tower fine last night and then updated my Macbook and ran into a big problem.

I have snow leopard on it and was going to 10.6.3...The laptop was not plugged into a power source when started and had about 10% power remaining..While it was updating I plugged in the power source.

Everything seemed to be fine and the update continued but at the very end there was an error message saying no update was performed.

I booted off the Snow leopard DVD and the contents of the hard drive seemed fine and I ran Disk Utilities and repaired permissions and found no errors.

I then (probably should not have) reinstalled Snow Leopard and that also seemed to be fine.

But the laptop will simply not boot up..The wheel 'spins' and nothing.

Any tips on how to get the laptop to boot up are appreciated. I know I can copy the data off of it and reformat but would prefer not to.

 

Go to the Apple Store.

 

shit. not that. anything but that!!!!

So not in the mood to deal with the Geniuses there. Has to be a way to delete and reinstall the system without wiping the drive..

well..,I'll work in it later after too many drinks and see if I can fix it...wait...that's what caused the problem in the first place!

 

fixed it! Don't know how of course...but ran the Snow Leopard installer a couple of times after trying this or that and it finally worked..now updating to latest version..backing up once again...and didn't have to talk to a Genius!

 

The actual issue was likely the system folder wasn't "blessed" and hence would not boot.

There's no real reason to reinstall the OS-- so long as it's still there, there are many options to go about fixing it.

If you ever have problems with a software update delta, the first thing you should do is download and run the latest combo updater BEFORE rebooting if at all possible.

 

Well how would I have 'blessed' the system as the computer failed to start up? I did run disk utilities from the DVD and found no errors in permissions or anything. The data was intact and the Mac would simply not start up.

Be good to know for next time...

is this how? "$ man bless"

lol

 

You can do it from the install DVD. Crank up an emergency terminal and run:

bless -folder /Volumes/HDNAME/System/Library/CoreServices

Alternatively you can boot the broken Mac into firewire target mode, connect it to another Mac, and bless it that way.

 

Good to know! Where the hell where you two days ago?