[geeks] DVD install of MacOS 10.5.3 or 10.5.4

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Nadine Miller wrote:

> The real pain in re-installing XP (or Vista, for that matter) is
> fetching and installing the latest and greatest hardware drivers.

That's why I put recent drivers on the installation CDs I build for the
lab.  nLite for network, storage, and chipset drivers, plain old
directories full of installation files for the rest.

> As *slow* as DL'ing and updating everything from M$ is, at least they
> are all in one place.

Windows Update is the last place I'd ever go for drivers.  The drivers
tend to be horribly out of date, and the installation process doesn't seem
to be very robust (network and storage drivers from WU have wedged more
systems for me than I can count).

> My #1 complaint with the XP install is that unless you slipstream, the
> *ONLY* place it will look for "additional drivers" during install is
> from a floppy.

What's doubly-fun is the following scenario:

   * Turn on USB (with legacy support) in the BIOS.
   * Connect a USB floppy drive, containing a diskette with storage
     drivers.
   * Boot the XP installation CD.
   * Press "F6" to load storage drivers.
   * Storage drivers load.
   * XP kernel loads.
   * Installation begins.
   * Just before the reboot,  the installation program goes to look for
     storage drivers from the floppy, but...OOPS.  You haven't any USB
     support anymore, and the only floppy drive the XP kernel knows about
     is the legacy one (that likely isn't present).
   * Installation crashes in a firebomb of failure.

> What is this, 1998? :-/

I say the same thing every time I have to do anything low-level on a PC.
BIOS updates?  Sure, I'll boot a decrepit thirty-year-old 16-bit
program-loader (from floppy) to transfer over a megabyte of firmware onto
my 8-way 64-bit SMP server.  Way to go!

Maybe EFI will trickle down to something other than Macs and Itaniums
sometime this century.  It's not OpenBoot, but it's a damn sight better
than this "BIOS nonsense that should've died with the 8086.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |