10.5.5 update woes

Now the Advent 4211 won't boot after accepting Apple's update patch from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5. It goes to a blue screen with a mouse cursor, but flashes back to a terminal window every 10s with sometimes an error message, mostly blank.

There is some info in this forum topic that suggests various kernel extensions (kexts) need to be reinstalled:

http://forums.msiwind.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3722&view=next

However, that is mainly for video display issues - seems that special MSI display kexts get nuked by the update. This one is for exactly my problem:

http://forums.msiwind.net/mac/blue-screen-after-update-t4018.html

I deleted AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext folder from /System/Library/Extensions because I found that it in this post, from Biohead (at the bottom of page):

http://forums.msiwind.net/mac/released-t3551.html

You have to make the disk writeable first:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /

The first one does a filesystem check, the second actually makes the disk writeable. I tried this several times but it didn't seem to work (using rm -r to remove the .kext directory) - turns out you need to 'exit' rather than just turn off the computer by holding down the power button for a long time. It must flush a cache then.

However, this didn't change anything.

Second post above seems to suggest downloading a pile of kernel extensions and installing over the ones that are there, after someone had the exact same problem as me. Also on this page, grantonstar also says to reinstall all kexts. Will track down what that means exactly!

The download is for a whole lot of kexts and other things required for a fresh install, and requires running kexthelper.app, which is clearly impossible. Looking for other ways, I figure I could just copy the kexts.

Need to mount the USB stick:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030714194313542

I am moving all the relevant kexts that are going to be replaced to /Users/michaelfielding/. Natit.kext and ACPIBattery.kext don't exist on the Advent yet.

Now I exit, and instead of going back to another terminal-like thing, it actually boots OS X! Hooray! And the right screen resolution too!