So my PowerBook has been unstable as hell. The OS has locked hard a few times, applications crash all the time and worst of all, after several compiles in XCode gcc just start segfaulting. I either have to restart XCode or restart the computer.
In the immortal words of the stoned Mac girl, “Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep”.
So last night I thought that I remembered upgrading to 10.3 form 10.2, instead of doing a fresh install. I really can’t remember which I did, but I figured there was a good chance it was an upgrade and OS upgrades are usually unstable. I’d never do a Windows upgrade, fresh installs are just better. With that in mind I decided to reinstall fresh.
I started the 10.3 install, told it to format the hard drive and it went to town. Right up to the point where it failed. Log showed that it was unable to write several files to the disk.
Not one to be easily disuaded I rebooted, put in my original 10.2 system software and tried to install that. No good. Couldn’t write several files to the disk.
Okay, so reboot again and to a “Format with all zeros” format on the drive, new volumes, the whole bit.
Install 10.2 and it goes just fine. Log complained that it couldn’t find a header on a “pax” but it never showed any error messages. So, I go to install 10.3 thinking the fresh format did the trick and it fails. Similar complaint to the 10.2 install.
So there are two possibilities here. One is that my OS X 10.3 CD is bad. Very possible, as the CD is very low quality. I’ll try to make a new one tonight. The other is that my hard drive is bad, or in the process of going bad. This will mean sending the PB to Apple. Not fun! Hopefully I’ll have a better idea tonight, cause last night I ran out of juice around 3am and passed out.