Leopard Blue Screen of Death

I just updated my iMac G5 to Leopard. I was bold, and I just did a simple upgrade. After all, these almost always work, right?

Well, I had two problems. The first, was the dreaded blue screen of death. The machine updated, and then just hung at the screen with a spinning cursor. What causes this?

Well there are many possibilities, most of them caused by an incompatible piece of software. For me, it was the dreaded “Application Enhancer” software I needed for Fruit Menu, a program I will sorely miss. But how to solve this problem?

There are clean installs you can do, but like so many, I want as little to change is what I have set up as possible. So I do an upgrade. If you do the upgrade and get stuck, and if you had Application Enhancer installed, here is a simple way to get rid of it and move on.

1. Restart the machine and hold Command-S after restarting the computer. This will start the computer in single-user mode, logged in as root. Note if your are not in the US. this ALWAYS assumes the US English keyboard layout

2. In single user mode, the file system is locked from changes. So first you need to unlock the file system. This can be done by typing the following and hitting carriage return:
/sbin/mount -uw /

3). Now, we want to remove the Application Enhancer bundle. This file lives in the folder /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/

First go to that folder by typing:

cd /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/

3). To confirm the bundle exists, type ‘ls’ and see if “ApplicationEnhancer.bundle” shows up in the list. If yes, we need to delete it.

3). Now we want to remove the bundle, so type:

rm -rf ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

The ‘-r’ means remove the entire directory structure (a bundle is a directory) and the ‘f’ means do not prompt for confirmation or display errors. You can leave off the f if you want to see each file it deletes and any errors that may occur.

4). To confirm the delete, do another ‘ls’ and see that it is gone now.

5). Now simply type ‘reboot’ and if this was the problem, you should now boot all the way up to the Finder.

Unfortunately, the people at Unsanity, the makers of Fruit Menu and Application Enhancer (and many other programs the rely on the Application Enhancer) have promised for months to have a Panther update, and still have none. Their web page says to be sure you have version 2.0.3 of Application Enhancer before doing an upgrade, but then that product says it is not compatible with 10.5. Best to just remove all of their applications at this time.

If the hang issue persists, then you will need to do some more drastic things, including a Archive and Install installation of Leopard. Be sure to check “Preserve user and network settings” to keep your account info.

After installing you will need to reinstall your applications. Be sure to verify each piece of software to be sure it is compatible with Leopard before reinstalling it, or obtain an update if necessary. This is especially true for any application “enhancement” software such as Application Enhancer.

As for my second problem, see my other blog on “No Admin Accounts after a Leopard Update?” which can be found
here.

Good luck.
-Owen-