Upgraded to Mountain Lion first update crashes system!

[mrfrisky330]

Recently upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.

All went well, installed correctly ran lovely, then the software update screen pops up saying there is a 1.7GB update for the OS, downloaded it, installed ok it then rebooted the system and promptly crashed after the white screen and the music with what looked like a list of register values and a an error message.

Hmmm...

Restored the computer from a TimeMachine backup, went through the same process, installed fine, message about the 1.7GB update, installed ok reboots computer crashes.

Questions are:

What causes this?

How can I skip past the corrupting update and get any later ones?

 

[mrfrisky330]

Forgot to mention the computer:

2010 21.5" iMac 8GB RAM 500GB HDD OSX Snow Leopard

 

[Weaselboy]

I'm wondering if you have some utility or something running that is conflicting with that Mountain Lion update version.

Try running the utility Etrecheck. It will give you a list of all startup and login items running. Go trough and remove all non-Apple login and startup items then give it a try.

Does a verify disk in Disk Utility show any errors?

 

[mrfrisky330]

I shall download Etrecheck and see what it says, no disk errors it just seems really odd its only that software update that crashes the system if I leave it without the update everything works fine, but I suspect that first update fixes issues etc ironic it causes one!

 

[mrfrisky330]

Ran it have attached a PDF of the results, this is as is now as Snow Leopard.

Anything stand out that could cause the issue after Mountain Lion is installed?

 

[Weaselboy]

Ran it have attached a PDF of the results, this is as is now as Snow Leopard.

Anything stand out that could cause the issue after Mountain Lion is installed?

Any third party kext or startup item (that is not from Apple) is suspect. I would start by removing these and see if that gets you going, then you can add back one by one later. You do have a lot of third party things running there.

The problem is this will be a rough troubleshooting process because you don't know what works until you do the update, then you are in a crash loop you can't get out of to troubleshoot some more. Ordinarily I would suggest removing a couple at a time (starting with Soundcloud I know causes crashing), and test. But in your case it takes literally hours to restore and test again... so I would remove them all and test, then add back.

I would remove everything on pages two and three of your PDF except the Internet plugins as those don't run until you launch a browser, so should not cause this.

One thing I notice there is Finder is using 95% CPU . That is a problem right there. If you look in Activity Monitor is it still doing that? I wonder if you have something running now even under SL that is causing troubles.

Let's try something still on SL. If Finder is still at 95%, do a safe mode boot by holding the shift key at startup. That will bypass all these startup items. Then if Finder settles down, we know it is a startup/login item or kext etc.

If you want to test a bit more in SL, try removing the ones in red from Etrecheck then after the safe mode test.

 

[mrfrisky330]

Done a bit of trimming to the system found a folder: /library/updates
Seems to be full of very old updates could I delete the contents?

 

[Weaselboy]

Done a bit of trimming to the system found a folder: /library/updates
Seems to be full of very old updates could I delete the contents?

Not sure. All I have in there on Yosemite is three plist files. What are you seeing there?

 

[mrfrisky330]

This:


041-3509
041-3789
041-4740
041-4810
041-5518
041-7031
061-7365
061-7415
061-7594
061-7748
061-7978
ProductMetadata.plist
index.plist
zzzz031-01974
zzzz031-02967
zzzz031-02989
zzzz031-06103
zzzz031-06977
zzzz031-0754
zzzz031-0755
zzzz031-07682
zzzz031-1473
zzzz031-3479
zzzz041-1280
zzzz041-1631
zzzz041-2070
zzzz041-3543
zzzz041-3780
zzzz041-4793
zzzz041-6901
zzzz041-8595
zzzz041-9781
zzzz061-9034
zzzz091-6057
zzzz091-9267

 

[Weaselboy]

This:

Everything except those plist files is leftover from a system update. I would delete all but the plists.

I had another thought earlier. When you get ready to do the ML update again, once you get on ML, do not run the system update but rather install it manually by applying the "combo update" from here. Sometimes that can get around these update issues.

I would still try and clear out those other items first though.

 

[mrfrisky330]

Reinstalled ML everything is cool, however software update came up with that update which it turns out is the 10.8.5 thats the one that kills it stone cold dead.

Having eliminated as many of the third party stuff as I could find before hand I attempted again to install the "combo" upgrade and yet again KABBOOOOOM!!

Added a screen grab of its demise

 

[chrfr]

Reinstalled ML everything is cool, however software update came up with that update which it turns out is the 10.8.5 thats the one that kills it stone cold dead.

If you download a new installer from the App Store, it will be 10.8.5 and you won't need to run that update separately.
You really do need to run 10.8.5 rather than an earlier version of Mountain Lion. It is all but certain that your issue is an incompatibility with the wide assortment of 3rd party software you have on the computer.

 

[mrfrisky330]

So how do I get rid of it??

 

[chrfr]

So how do I get rid of it??

I would do a clean install of 10.8.5, and manually reinstall the software you need, making sure you have current versions as you go.

 

[mrfrisky330]

Is it possible to format the drive and install ML on it?

It boots in safe mode! Am attempting to delete lots of stuff however "Toast Titanium" app can't be deleted message comes up saying its required by OS X - how can I delete it??

 

[chrfr]

Is it possible to format the drive and install ML on it?

It boots in safe mode! Am attempting to delete lots of stuff however "Toast Titanium" app can't be deleted message comes up saying its required by OS X - how can I delete it??

The application itself won't be the problem, but rather all the extensions that installed with it. I have no idea why you're getting the message that it's required by OS X. You can delete it with Terminal. type the following in terminal and then drag the Toast application into the Terminal window BEFORE YOU PRESS RETURN:

sudo rm -rf

then, press return and enter your password.
That EtreCheck report gives you the list of 3rd party software that runs at startup so you can work through that report and delete the 3rd party files that way.
If you have 10.8 installed, you should now have a recovery partition, which means you can start up from that, while holding command-R, and then you'll have the option to erase the disk, and reinstall a fresh copy of OS X 10.8.

 

[mrfrisky330]

Thats just genius!

 

[mrfrisky330]

It has all been terribly complicated!

Tried to restart the mac in recovery mode to format the drive and reinstall ML on the zapped drive but the recovery partition didn't work

Used time machine to restore the machine back to SL, then inserted the SL CD and used that to format the drive and reinstall SL.

Then updated that to its last version then inserted the ML CD (I have luckily burned after downloading it) used that to install ML then applied the 10.8.1/2/3/4 and 5 updates rebooting between each one and now it works!

Yes did remove all the old 32 bit programs and tested each one to see if it worked with ML and now I have a working machine again

Would have been nice if Apple had a proper recovery system if you spend nearly 3 hours downloading a new OS (which seems a step backwards for the 21st century and installing from a DVD is a lot easier and if things go wrong you don't have to spend ANOTHER 2-3 hours downloading the same thing certainly isn't progress) that the file would be automatically copied to the recovery partition and any future updates should give you the option to copy those to the recovery partition as well so if you need to recover everything that is current is instantly available.

There again we are talking about corporations here and they certainly are not run for our benefit...

Thanks for all the super useful advice