David Vollbracht

Some colleagues on my current project got together tonight to do some Rubinius hacking. Pat organized the event as a way to jump start us with the goal of getting Rubinius working on everybody’s laptop and start digging into the code, possibly producing a couple of patches. I was pretty gung-ho about it until about 30 minutes in when my MacBook turned into a MacBrick. Here was the sequence of events:

• Clone the Rubinius get repository
• rake build #=> get error message complaining about libgcc_s.1.dylib not being found
• copy libgcc_s.1.dylin found in /Developer to /usr/lib
• try to rake build again #=> get error message complaining about loading said library
• try to rm /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib #=> get error message complaining about loading said library
• try to delete /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib through finder #=> see finder take a very long time trying to delete the file
• try to shutdown system through menu #=> see finder refuse to shutdown because it is deleting a file
• power down system by holding the power button #=> see screen go black
• try to power system on #=> get macintosh grey screen of death

At this point I wasn’t sure what to do, but fortunately I had some people around with some suggestions. Holding Command-S (to boot to single user mode) while attempting to boot at least showed the output of the kernel booting up, the interesting parts of which are

pid 1 exited (signal 0, exit 1)panic(cpu 1 caller 0x00338986): init died
...
Debugger called: <panic>
...
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbffff968

Other magical boot options didn’t help the situation at all. The only promising option was holding T and booting, which booted the MacBrick into target mode. After making a trip to best buy to pick up a firewire cable, we were able to hook the brick up to another Mac and look at the drive. We tried various combinations of removing the offending library, removing the file of the same name from the .Trashes directory and doing a repair from withing Disk Utility. None of these had any substantial effect.

I’ve learned a lot about troubleshooting Macs tonight—various boot options and using target mode to get at the disk of a borked machine. So far it has all been to no avail. My MacBook remains a brick at this point (thanks Pat for letting me write my post from your machine). I suspect that shutting the machine down during the delete is the culprit, which is corroborated by some google searching. I strongly advise that you avoid doing so if at all possible. Next stop for me? The Apple store.