Broken Apple Updates (Update)

A couple of months ago, I wrote about some problems I was having with Apple software updates that were stopping my MacBook connecting to my wireless network. That problem has just got far worse.

Since having the problems, we’ve learned to avoid Apple Airport updates. Whenever the software updater tells us that there’s an airport update pending we just ignore it. This policy has worked well for over two months.

But on Wednesday there were a new load of updates which managed to break the wireless connectivity even though we ignored the airport update that was included. The symptoms were exactly the same as the two previous times – the computer could connect to our neighbour’s wireless network but couldn’t even see ours.

So I assumed that the fix would be the same too. And this morning I copied the backed up files into the correct directories and rebooted the system. But the fix didn’t work quite as well as it usually does. This time the wireless connectivity icon on the menu bar vanished.

I rebooted again. Because, y’know, well… an extra reboot never hurts :-)

And this time as the computer got about twenty seconds into starting up it displayed a grey box saying something like “you need to restart your computer again”. Which I did, only to be greeted with the same message again. I tried another half a dozen times, but nothing changed.

So I’m stuck with Mac that won’t start up. And I’m pretty sure that we didn’t get the operating system disk with the Mac so I can’t really see how I can boot it up in some kind of “rescue mode” in order to fix whatever it is that is broken.

I foresee a trip to the genius bar over the weekend.

Unless any of my Mac-wielding readers can suggest anything that might help.

Update: Paul points out that holding down the shift key whilst rebooting prevents the Mac from loading any kernel extensions. This means I can, at least, boot the Mac and get to work on fixing the mess that the update (with, I admit, some help from me) has made of the machine.

Update: Here’s what has worked in the end. I downloaded the OSX 10.4.10 Combo Update to ensure that I had a completely updated system. That got me back to the level where everything worked except the wireless connectivity. Then I had the bright idea of updating the wireless access point’s firmwire to the most recent version. That seems to have fixed any incompatibilities between the access point and OSX. And now everything is working fine.