There’s a happy ending to this story, but you’re never going to believe what happened to the new PowerBook I got for work. (Includes lesson learned!)

Yesterday started out innocently enough.

And then, it happened. Applications started quitting “unexpectedly.”

First it was the some of the apps in the toolbar. Then, the Finder started crashing. It got so bad that I could only run the Terminal app, and even that was crashing while I typed in things. Naturally, I suspected RAM, so I tried to boot up the TechTools CD that came with my AppleCare agreement. The only problem, as reported in several places on the web, is that the CD is an older version and it won’t boot on newer hardware. (I’ll complain to Apple about that when I get this all resolved.)

The problem didn’t get any better when I was trying to recover things by using a FireWire cable and target disk mode to repair the disk from the old laptop. More files and directories disappeared each time I ran the repair utility. In the end I ran the repair 5 or 6 times before it finally reported success. However, now the machine wouldn’t boot. It was right about this point that I started to suspect something strange, so I unplugged all of the peripherals, made sure that I was using only my Apple keyboard and swapped the power supplies on my desk (new power supply with new laptop, old power supply with old), and plugged in the system restore DVD.

I opted to archive and save system settings and user accounts. The restore was pretty painless. While I was waiting, I noted that I hadn’t had any trouble since I swapped the power supplies. Sure enough, the older PowerBook has a 45W power supply, and the newer one is rated as 65W. You don’t suppose starving the laptop for power could cause any trouble, do you? Nah, me neither.

So, I set to the task of updating and restoring custom bits I had on the laptop previously. This was a little tedious, but fortunately I knew where most of it was – custom preference panes, drivers for odd hardware (like the Microsoft mouse I use at work), VPN software, and the like – so it was pretty straightforward. However, there were 3 pieces of software that wouldn’t install: iChat Update 2.1, Security Update 2004-06-07, and Xcode 1.2. (I noticed that QuickTime 6.5.1 also had trouble, but seemed to rectify itself.)

A bit of poking around in the logs turned up the fact that the Perl script use to do the “preflight” checks for iChat and the security update were failing with a nondescript “error 11” – a “Memory fault” for the technically inclined among you – and further digging showed that even “perl -V” died with the same error when attempting to find out what modules were loaded. If it weren’t for a flash of inspiration I’d still be stuck there, but I realized that there were some Perl-related things in /System/Library/Perl that might be the culprit. I moved them out of the way and dug the folder out of the previously archived system folder. Voilà! Perl now runs properly, and I was able to install all of the software.

It took about 4 hours to recover from all of this. Not pleasant, but I know I saved at least 6 hours over going back to the brute force method of wiping it completely clean and copying data from the old laptop to the new. There were still a few issues, including some random “hangs” and a couple of panics, but reinstalling the 10.3.4 combo updater and making sure the system wasn’t trying to use my (powered down) Bluetooth headset seems to have resolved those.

So what’s the lesson learned? Never assume that the power adapter, or any other peripherals or cables, are necessarily the same as those used with the older hardware.

Gah.

Ah well, at least the laptop is stable again. I just wish I could get those 4 hours back.