security update 2010-001 can be deadly! - 01/22/10 04:58 PM
I've never seen a case in the past where an apple software update would run on a system it wasn't meant to, until now. The 2010-001 update comes in two flavors, one for 10.5 (161mb) and one for 10.6 (22mb). The 10.6 update will rightly refuse to run on a 10.5 system, but the 10.5 update WILL try to run on a 10.6 system. I made the mistake of downloading the update on a 10.5 machine and dropping it with a flash drive onto all our demos, several of which were 10.6.
It will get about 2/3 through the install and stop with a nonspecific error. Even the detailed install log doesn't tell what went wrong. The computer will not be able to launch apps and will not shut down via the menu, a power cycle is required to restart it.
And it will boot to the spinning gear forever. Safe boot and the 10.6.2 combo updater (applied from another booted disk) have no effect, archive and install of 10.6 is required to fix it.
I had just finished running the updater on the 27" imac when I noticed the 21 wasn't getting past the gear, and decided to wait it out to make sure Bad Things weren't afoot. Glad, I'd have had 5 more machines to fix otherwise...
I also note that 10.6 installer lacks the Options button and doesn't let you specify A&I, it appears to always do it. This means there's no way to do an A&I without retaining users and network settings, if your network settings have become trashed and A&I is migrating them over as corrupted. I talked with Apple about this problem to report it and also discussed the A&I option lacking in 10.6 and apparently they're also finding that troublesome on the applecare line. BTW this also means if you want to do an erase and install, you need to go into disk utility and format the drive and return to the installer. The applecare rep I spoke with speculated this change was made to make it harder to accidentally do E&I.
It will get about 2/3 through the install and stop with a nonspecific error. Even the detailed install log doesn't tell what went wrong. The computer will not be able to launch apps and will not shut down via the menu, a power cycle is required to restart it.
And it will boot to the spinning gear forever. Safe boot and the 10.6.2 combo updater (applied from another booted disk) have no effect, archive and install of 10.6 is required to fix it.
I had just finished running the updater on the 27" imac when I noticed the 21 wasn't getting past the gear, and decided to wait it out to make sure Bad Things weren't afoot. Glad, I'd have had 5 more machines to fix otherwise...
I also note that 10.6 installer lacks the Options button and doesn't let you specify A&I, it appears to always do it. This means there's no way to do an A&I without retaining users and network settings, if your network settings have become trashed and A&I is migrating them over as corrupted. I talked with Apple about this problem to report it and also discussed the A&I option lacking in 10.6 and apparently they're also finding that troublesome on the applecare line. BTW this also means if you want to do an erase and install, you need to go into disk utility and format the drive and return to the installer. The applecare rep I spoke with speculated this change was made to make it harder to accidentally do E&I.