When Mavericks Attacks!

“Free” proved a little too irresistible and I immediately upgraded both Macs in my possession to OS X Mavericks as soon as the download became available yesterday. Unfortunately, the Macbook Air didn’t make it out alive. As you can see from the video above (click to play), it’s become stuck in an endless reboot loop of alternating grey screens, one covered in errors. I’ll probably take the easy way out and hit the Apple Store for an OS restore. The iMac did escape unscathed, although Apple’s sense of time is slightly off (1 minute, 10 minutes, whatev), and my first order of business was removing the new-yet-superfluous Apple Maps and iBooks from the dock.

18 thoughts on “When Mavericks Attacks!”

  1. Don’t know and there’s no recovery thumb drive in the box, so either I lost it or they stopped providing them. No biggie, I just made a noon o’clock appointment at the Apple Store. :) (If you’re live in the right areas, Genius Bar is one of the top reasons to go Apple.)

  2. Agreed. I used to live with a few Apple geniuses. Give Command+Option+R a shot at boot if you want to see if internet recovery works.

  3. Color me underwhelmed. I too jumped on the upgrade for my 27″ iMac, and when I was done, I couldn’t tell I had upgraded. While I may be an IT guy, I still like a little eye candy. My first thoughts were, “Of *course* they didn’t charge for it, it’s nothing more than a patch….”

    That being said, there’s an excellent 24 page(!) review of the inner workings and why this is technically an upgrade. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/

  4. Thanks Michael, Jon – you’ve motivated me to give the self help route a try. Command+Option+R offered up a few choices, with the most likely to succeed (in my estimation) being a Mountain Lion restore and it looks like the OS files are streaming down from the Internet. Who knew! Looks like it’ll take about an hour and then I’ll try Mavericks again on a cleaner slate.

  5. Note: Portable computers that have a battery you should not remove on your own include MacBook Pro (Early 2009) and later, all models of MacBook Air, and MacBook (Late 2009).
    Shut down the computer.
    Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
    On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
    Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
    Press the power button to turn on the computer.
    Note: The LED on the MagSafe power adapter may change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.

  6. “Pro tip: always make a backup before a system upgrade!”

    Better pro tip: always make a drive clone immediately prior to upgrading. Carbon Copy Cloner is my software recommendation to do so, though there are other viable options.

    Then, if something goes blooey, then you can boot off the clone, restore the clone to your original drive, reboot from your original drive, and be back up and running exactly as your were prior to the botched upgrade, in only an hour or so.

    No muss. No fuss. Very limited loss of time.

  7. Thanks, Chucky – didn’t even know that was still around, it’s been a few years since I’ve used it. Mountain Lion re-installed successfully. Giving Mavericks another try. Hoping I can skip the trip to the Apple Store since my wife asked me to buy her a T-Mobile iPhone 5s to replace her Verizon iPhone 5. Doh!

  8. Yes, apple hasn’t supplied a local disk or thumb drive version of the OS for a while now, especially with devices with no physical drives. The remote access download and re-install has been the way for a couple years. The power of the community!

    If you have a backup somewhere locally, external HD or NAS, you can restore all your data once the remote install downloads and re-installs.

  9. My 2013 and 2010 MacBook Airs made it through ok. I finally like OS X calendar. I’ve started using that instead of google calendar.

  10. I will say this, upgrading to Mavericks has been great for me so far. My Roxio Toast Titanium 11 Tivo Transfer software which never worked after I bought it for Mountain Lion, is now working again after taking the OS upgrade.

  11. It took about two hours total to reinstall both Mountain Lion and upgrade to Mavericks, with some cleanup in between, and some kernel alert after (related to a Netgear aircard). But all in all I think the MBA finally made it to the other side OK, knock on wood.

    Has anyone taken a detailed look at the new Safari password/keychain keeper? Wondering if it’s a reasonably safe approach. It’s certainly cheaper than 1password, etc… (which I never implemented).

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