Current progress in fixing 10.4.6 failed install

Question

I'm now making some progress in understanding the failiure, however it's leaving me with some BIG questions as to the checks apple put in.
This still hasn't fully worked for me! This is also an abbreviated account, please don't try unless your familiar with a shell prompt! Once I know what's going on better, I'll expand.
I've so far done the following (appologies for any typos, I7m typing on a tiny pda keyboard).
booted from dvd
opened a terminal.
noted chroot /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/ /bin/bash seg faults
created a dir fakesys at the root of the hd
copied /var /bin /sbin and /usr from the dvd dir into fakesys
made a tmp dir there
copied the pkg dir for the upgrade which had been moved out of trash just before I rebooted to the fakesys dir as well as stuff like gunzip from /usr/bin on the hd.
chrooted to fakesys running bash
gunziped the Archive.pax.gz
made a subdir, and from it pax -r -f ../Archives.pax
backed up the /usr/lib from the hd (using tar cf - * | tar xf - - C <dest> to preserve links perms etc ... no man pages so couldn't look up the cp switches to do that! . Backed up kernel too
did the same tar trick to install all updates from root
noted a few files were a lot smaller, such as libMath something, libobjc and the kernel...
tried chroot, diffferent error, about math lib. put in old,and chroot worked!
rebooted... no joy... back to dvd, replace old kernel
rebooted... (watching in verbose mode)... system got some way, than auto rebooted as per upgrade! (excitment rose!)
as comming up again, lots of errors about libobjc.. booted from cd and replaced.
tried again in verbose mode.
looked good but then Firewall.app failed. after that I got lots of memberd couldn't find root users. Now on further reboots it panics with the kernel straight away.
I'll keep on digging, and will update this thread as I discover more. I think the problem maybe the library files i had to roll back, as the dmesg command still seg faults in the chrooted environment

Answer 1

Where did you obtain this? If the install failed,
isn't it possible or even likely that the file was
damaged at that point & the truncation is a result of
that? I'm no expert, but the man page for pax says
something about it only partially extracting files if
one is terminated by errors. Additionally, there is a
cryptic man entry under "bugs" about pax not
recognizing multibyte characters, which may be a part
of it.
Also, in another thread, you mention terminal was
open at the time of the install. Were you doing
anything that could have caused the install to fail?
Terminal was open (I normally have it open for ssh/scp to other machines), but wasn't running anything except bash.
As I said, I obtained the file via Software Update, left it downloading to install then went to work. When I returned I had a message the install had failed, and the pkg was in the recycle bin. The machine would not run anything from this point, and even shutdown failed. Is it likely that a failed install would truncate the file? I really can't see why. Why would you write to an archive file in an install situation? Anyway, as I said, I can't say much on pax archives, but the archive was compressed. If you have a hard time understanding my confusion, try the following experiment. take a copy of one of your files, then do the following with a reasonable large file (split by default splits after 1000 lines):
% gzip <file>
% split <file>.gz
% mv xaa xaa.gz
% gunzip xaa.gz
Split will create several files (slipting your compressed file). You'll see unziping a truncated file produces an error.
Now it is quite possible that the install uses something like gzcat, which only produces errors at the end, such as "gzcat Archive.pax.gz | pax -r" the thing is, running gunzip Archive.pax.gz on the file SU downloaded produced no errors, so that's what confuses me. At any rate, it is best practice to checksum patch archives before running, and apple clearly don't do this, which is incredibly poor. I'm really not sure why there are a large number of people on this forum who find it so hard to believe that apple can do no wrong, and that every fault must be that of the user. Apple are not perfect, far from it. This is beginig to tire me. I found a solution when everyone else seemed to be saying use another mac, or re-install. I looked into what happened, and found the update the su had downloaded to be corrupt. I came up with a fix and shared. I think apple should look into this, and take feedback on several issues I've raised (and I'm sure others who found what I did would comment on too). If you want to insist it's not an apple problem, that's your perogative. I'd be the first to admit that I don't know much about macs (and didn't have much nice to say about them pre-osx), however, I do have a lot of experience with unix, and that's what I'm basing my comments on, and what I used to fix my mac.Anyway, enough ranting I need sleep.