[geeks] DVD install of MacOS 10.5.3 or 10.5.4

[Nadine Miller]

On Aug 5, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Nadine Miller wrote:
>> 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 tend to be horribly out of date, and the installation process  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).

I meant OS updates.  I try to avoid M$ hardware driver updates when  
it's possible for the same reason.

>> 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.

Ouch.  M$, purveyor of catch-22's since 1975.
>
>> 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!

People are doing all kinds of crazy BIOS fiddling to get around OS and  
other software checks.  It's quite amazing some of the stuff people  
are doing to work around their limitations.

The most annoying thing to me about my tablet experiments thus far:  I  
went over to the Fujitsu site to get drivers, and saw that a BIOS  
update was available.  Fujitsu uses a proprietary BIOS update file  
format (now way to convert it that I found), and have their own loader  
for it.  It was intended to make BIOS updates "easy" so you could do  
them from within Windows.  Problem is, they haven't updated the loader  
for Vista and don't plan to.   On the Vista side, they do individual  
update binaries for each update that is published.  So, to install the  
BIOS update, I had to image the Vista install, reload XP, update the  
BIOS, then reload the Vista image.  If I hadn't had one of those  
unofficial super-stripped unattended XP install CDs, I wouldn't have  
even considered installing it.

> 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.

It's my hope that all this EFI "emulation" hackery thanks to the OSx86  
crowd might help with the movement.  It's really too bad that Apple  
couldn't have convinced them to use OpenBoot, but I can understand why  
Intel would want to leverage it's investment in EFI.

=Nadine=