My coworker’s daughter offered me a copy of Leopard last week. I declined, since it would violate the copyright. She had already installed it on her computer.
Today she called and her mom passed me the phone. She said that the Macintosh HD icon was not on the desktop. She said that she was unable to power down her MacBook by pressing the power button. I suggested she shut down by going to the Apple icon and choosing Shut Down. She said the Apple icon isn’t there, and that ‘Oh, yeah. The whole bar is missing.’ Basically, her computer is dead in the water.
I told her she could take the MacBook to the Mac store, but they’d probably tell her that she has an unauthorised copy of Leopard and she’s out of luck. I said she should get the copy of Tiger that came with her computer and reinstall the OS. (I didn’t bother to say, ‘And let that be a lesson to you!’)
Questions: What would cause the described symptoms? Will she be able to reinstall Tiger from her original (legal) disc with the computer not responding? How would she do it?
If you hold down the power button for 5-10 seconds, it will power down the computer. I think this is hardware assisted; I’ve never had it fail even with a system not responding.
If not, yank the battery and the power cord, and it WILL shut down.
Simply rebooting will probably fix it, depending on what’s wrong. Alternatively, the Mac OS X install disks have a copy of disk utility on them, which can repair many issues. But if the problem survives a reboot and repair, yes – she’ll need to re-install.
I’d suggest doing the re-install with a (legal!) copy of Leopard, which will minimize her pain (it’s not like Windows where you have to nuke and pave) – her apps should still be installed. I’m not sure this trick will work with a downgrade back to Tiger.
The AppleCare folks often have you do this and hold down the power button for ten seconds or so with battery and cord removed. This erases some internal memory. It’s worth a shot.
No HD icon, no toolbar, does she see the dock ? If not, if she gets just a plain blue screen, that means the installation was not successful. Restart from the installation CD (pressing C during startup), and instead of selecting “Upgrade Mac OS X” as upgrade option (default), select “Archive and Install” (this needs some spare HD space).
The Finder is hanging before it completes its startup sequence.
As Timewinder says, hold down the power button for 5-10 seconds.
A reinstall is your best bet if it turns out that the problem is not a one time oddity.