OS 10.5.8 update failure

Update and restart went smoothly after an hour of waiting...

I was somewhat apalled when I realized it had reinstalled Safari 4.02, as it did not at all work under 10.5.7 (freezing upon startup), making me resort to some alchemy to get 3 reinstalled. However, the update to 10.5.8 fixed whatever was causing the problem before. An added bonus.

The corrupt downloads reflect internet connection problems between Apple and you. I've downloaded these updates for three machines the past two days without experiencing any corrupted files. I'm on RoadRunner cable and it's working without errors. Maybe it's because more people are jumping on the bandwagon to update, but that's just a WAG.

Richard Briscoe1 wrote:
It gets worse!

I went to update my other Leopard machine this evening. I downloaded the OS 10.5.8 Combo Updater six or seven times. Each and every one of them was corrupt and either failed to open at all or generated a different error message. I tried using Software Update for the incremental update and it was corrupt as well.

I think the time has come for Apple to simply withdraw the OS 10.5.8 Update altogether until such time as they can get it right.

On top of that, the discussions forums were having problems and it was not possible to login. Sheesh! Way to go Apple! (Not)

Couldn't be your internet connection. Seriously, 10s of 1000s have d/loaded the update w/o a hitch. If you are getting so many bad d/loads then maybe its your ISP to blame?

Well you guys have got further than me with update 10.5.8!!

This is what happened on my iMac...

I am the administrator for my iMac and I've checked my permissions which are set to admin rights.

After clicking install 10.5.8 combined it asks me for my password then takes me to the licence screen. After clicking Agree - after about 3 seconds it comes back with the following error...

"The Update Mac OSX 10.5.8 Combined cant be saved. You do not have appropriate access privelege. Installer has been moved to trash - to try again open the package from Finder".

Trash is empty - it hasn't moved anything there...

I've tried restarting the machine and changing my password - but still get the same error.....

Any ideas ?

TheGuyintheProjectionBooth wrote:
Understood. But that should not be the case. Accuracy is a key factor. If the installer is not accurate in operation, what says that the install is accurate?

Keep in mind that the time remaining display for any complex process is -- & can only be -- an estimate. It is not unlike estimated preparation times in cookbooks or estimated repair times for cars -- sometimes a step takes much longer than expected for various reasons that are hard to foresee until the process is actually begun. And because completing a single step in the update process may depend on the completion of other steps, each of which may also have dependencies on other steps, updating the time remaining estimate before a step is complete does not necessarily improve the accuracy of the estimate.

In fact, too frequent updating of the estimate just slows the overall process down since that requires proportionally more resources that otherwise could be devoted directly to completing the installation to be diverted to auditing its progress. (It is much like a mechanic having to constantly stop working on a car to report how long each step took & why it did, & a service manager constantly revising the estimated time of completion based on those reports.)

This is why the time estimate sometimes seems to hang or jump from one value to another instead of counting down smoothly: it only makes sense to revise the estimate at certain points in the process, after some series of well-defined steps (or sub-steps) are completed.

Hone Melgren wrote:
PS I'm speculating that some code monkey didn't estimate how long this last process would take.

It isn't that a coder didn't estimate how long it would take, it is that how long it will take is nearly impossible to predict with any meaningful accuracy on any particular Mac. OS X is a modern, multithreaded OS, which means many threads occur in parallel, often with complex cross-dependencies that require suspension of some threads until other ones reach a well-defined state. At the hardware level, both the capabilities & current state of the level 1 & level 2 buffers, speculative branch prediction in the CPU(s), VM performance (itself dependent on the state of the hard drive), & so on all influence how fast threads will execute.

Basically, the accuracy of the prediction is strongly dependent on how accurately the current state of the machine is known. Since even small differences in (for instance) the Receipts folder & the items they reference can make big differences in the internal state of one Mac vs. another, only gross estimates of how long the process will take are possible, at least without devoting massive computational time to that task, which itself would take an unknown & almost certainly very lengthy amount of time to complete -- quite possibly longer than the whole process would otherwise take.

Richard Briscoe1 wrote:
an installer which "hangs" (or appears to) for 30 to 60 minutes or more is not a good one. *I would > say that it is unprecedented in my experience with OS X.*

BINGO! You clearly either haven't had much experience with Mac installers (OS 7-10) or your experiences have been excellent thus far. It is NOT unusual for a particular machine to take more or less time to update, depending on many factors.

The update is fine. Really! As above, GIVE IT TIME. It is NOT hanging. Go have a drink or something. Watch a movie. If you sit there and time the thing, it will seem to take longer and you will feel compelled to "do something" which is the WORST thing you can do as you can leave your system crippled by an early force quit or force shut down.

We want you to have a good Mac experience, we really do. We answer these posts because we are trying to help. We're on YOUR side!!!

Richard Briscoe1 wrote:
I would say that it is unprecedented in my experience with OS X. It only takes about 45 minutes to do a complete installation from the Leopard DVD and about 30 minutes if installed from a hard drive.

It is not unprecedented in my experience for a complete installation from the Leopard DVD to take far longer, depending on the particular Mac, the kind of installation, how full the hard drive is, & a host of other factors. Likewise, the preparation step for a Leopard permissions repair varies greatly depending on the same factors.

Because of this, I have come to accept that the 'time remaining' estimates throughout the OS are at best crude ones. Whether this is theoretically "right" or not I cannot say, only that it is as right as the practical limits on the time it takes to make more accurate estimates of complex processes allow.

IOW, I doubt users would be very happy if the cost of accurate estimates was a long wait before anything actually happened besides computing that estimate....

Douglas,

I had the exact same thing happen to me. It installed successfully and asked for me to click the Restart button, which I did. It started to shut down but stopped at the desktop and dock. I let it sit there in that state for 45 minutes and nothing happened so I powered it down and restarted. It did the double restart and all seems to be well.

Ed

R C-R wrote:
It is not unprecedented in my experience for a complete installation from the Leopard DVD to take far longer, depending on the particular Mac, the kind of installation, how full the hard drive is, & a host of other factors. Likewise, the preparation step for a Leopard permissions repair varies greatly depending on the same factors.

Yeah but in this case its not the permissions that took a long time to do. It wasn't even the writing of the files specifically that was the slow down.

It was the step where the receipt files were written into the Receipts folder that was taking the longest. All because the programmer choose to use a separate call to the package receipt updater process for each code signature file in the receipts database.

That's incredibly inefficient right there.

See I brought a copy of Leopard that was at 10.5.4 . So I've done 3 other Leopard system installs of the "new method". Each one has been around 5 - 10 for the entire Installer.app process of prepping files to install , writing them to a temp location , writing the receipts and then restarting. On the restart is when they get actually get installing including quite possibly the updating of permissions part.

This 10.5.8 is the first one I've ever had take an inordinate amount of time in the pre-install Installer.app step of the process.