monline

I've found that a new update was available via "Software Update" for my Mac OS X. It upgraded my OS from 10.4.9 to 10.4.10. The update went without a hitch and the system was fully operational after the reboot. I've used it for a couple of hours, then turned it off and went to sleep. Next morning I turned the machine on, the OS booted without problems, but after the login I could not start anything. If I clicked an app in the Dock, its icon started blinking, but the app did not start. I could not even shut down or reboot the Mac.

I grabbed the OS install discs and first booted the hardware test by inserting disc #1 and pressing "D" during boot. It did not find any problems, not even in extended test mode. I booted from the DVD by pressing "C" during boot and ran Disk Utility on the internal hard drive of the MacBook Pro. No problems here either. Then I booted into single user (console) mode by pressing Cmd+S during boot (after the screen turns grey, but before the wheel or the Apple logo would appear). This way a lot of daemons and processes do not start automatically, but the root filesystem gets mounted and you have access to basic commands (eg. the vi editor). I checked the /var/log/system.log logfile and found these:

The last line was repeated seemingly without end (at least a couple of dozen times). Fortunately I've another computer at home so I could go online and search for the error message. I've found the answer in a post at macosxhints.com (where else ). They say that this can happen (like a known issue) after Software Updates and turning off the automounter helps. I've edited /etc/hostconfig and turned off the automounter (in single user mode) and could successfully boot the system. Everything was working fine. I've rebooted a couple of times, then turned the automounter back on and the OS broke again. It seems that I've lost the ability to use the automounter at all. While this is nothing crucial or annoying to me (at least for the moment, since I've never used the network connections in Finder), but it might become annoying if eg. I'd get a NAS or some sort of network file sharing for home. It is certainly a bug and caused a bit of a shock, when I first faced it.