Recovering a badly crashed system Sun. Feb 24 '02 (online at http://www.macosxhints.com)
So I'm upgrading our server (running MacOSX client) to 10.1.3, when all of a sudden it crashes in the middle of the upgrade. I log into the server from another machine, and kill the window server, which brings the server back to the login screen.
On the server, I login, and lo and behold, the system version and all that thinks it's 10.1.3. When I run Software Update again it encounters an 'error' and crashes again.
So I restart, thinking something will right itself. Everything is hunky dory until I notice that the cursor won't move. At this point the keyboard works fine, I can login, use the [limited] built-in keyboard navigation, etc ... the Pro Mouse is lit, but the cursor won't move.
After stressing a bit, running Norton, etc., I end up tethering the server in FireWire mode to my desktop machine. On the desktop, I use Pacifist to examine the contents of the 10.1.3 receipt file to see what components might have been changed. Using this list, I copy those resources over from the Desktop machine to the server, cross my fingers, and reboot the server.
Lo and behold, it works. Just goes to show that a little bit of MacOS 9 trickery will still get you somewhere in this brave new world.
[Editor's note: Although not exactly a hint, this story could prove useful as a guideline to some things to try in the event of system problems. Note that this is probably not the recommended way to recover from such a situation; a format and reinstall would be technically best, but that's not always feasible.]
