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There is a really serious error in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. It can cause your Mac’s disk to become corrupted and unbootable. Rosyna at Unsanity discovered this in his spelunking of OS X. He publicized it months ago, and yet I still see people being affected by it often. My day job is at <famous Hollywood studio>, where a lot of the creative people use Macs, just like at all the other famous Hollywood studios. I don’t support Macs myself, but I work with folks that do. At every update of OS X they get a couple of desperate calls from people whose Macs have crashed and won’t boot any longer. It can be a painful process for them to get these people up and running again.Preventing the problem is much simpler than recovering from it. It requires a little effort, but it works. Here’s how to avoid any problems with OS X updates:

1.  Download the combo update from Apple’s support downloads site. Don’t get the regular delta updater, get the big combo updater.
2. Close all your applications. Don’t cheat and leave Safari open so you’ll have something to read, either. Close ‘em all! Don’t open any programs until the end of the whole procedure.
3. Run Disk Utility to
   1. first, verify your disk to make sure there are no file system errors. If there are, reboot in single-user mode and fsck or boot from an install CD and repair the disk with Disk Utility from the CD.
   2. second, repair permissions. There has been a lot of talk about this process being everything from a miraculous cure to a complete hoax. I don’t really know what all the fuss is about. There is exactly one situation when repairing permissions helps: when the permissions are incorrect. However, if permissions are incorrect on parts of your system, you can have all kinds of crazy and unexplainable troubles.
4. Run the installer for the update. Reboot if necessary.
5. Wait. This is important. The first boot after an update takes longer than normal. A lot of the installation actually happens during the reboot. On a few old machines like G3 and G4 iBooks, it might take ten minutes. Don’t interrupt the first boot after an update unless you’re damn sure the machine has crashed. And then wait some more, anyway.
6. Log in and enjoy. Run some programs. Relax and surf the web safe in the knowledge that you just saved yourself a metric buttload of hassles and stress.
7. If you’re particularly superstitious you could run Disk Utility to verify your disk and permissions after the update, but you’re not very likely to find any problems. Don’t bother unless you had file system errors before the update.

Hopefully, this will all be resolved in Leopard and no one will have to worry about it any more. But, until that time, please take the slow and steady approach to system updates. It’s worth the trouble.

If you want to see what’s involved in setting up FogBugz on the Mac, or need some help with it, check out this article. Installing FogBugz on Windows is a piece of cake. It’s quite a bit more complicated on Mac and Linux.