Mac OS X Disaster Relief: Troubleshooting Techniques to Help Fix It Yourself

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I usually have a tall stack of books in the [Mac] review pipeline, and new additions are added to the bottom of the pile. Sometimes it takes titles a while to surface, but when Ted Landau's Mac OS X Disaster Relief arrived, it went promptly to the head of the pile.

When I began reading the actual troubleshooting sections, I began to worry.

"Did I make a mistake upgrading to Mac OS X?"

When I was half finished with the troubleshooting sections, I worried some more.

"Maybe I made a mistake owning a Macintosh."

By the time I finished the book, I was really worried.

"Maybe I should just get rid of all my computers!"

After reading page after page of gruesome OS X problems, I felt spooked. But after a cup of warm milk, I remembered that I'd never seen many of these gremlins, and probably never will. My OS X installation runs well most of the time. But I have had troubles that took quite a while to eradicate. I wish I had Mac OS X Disaster Relief close at hand before my last experience with a disk I could not unmount.

Mac OS X Disaster Relief is not the kind of book you buy to get a warm and fuzzy feeling about OS X's incredible stability, and how its bulletproof Unix foundation never crashes. You won't find any of the marketing happy-talk that spews from the depths of Apple's PR machine.

What you will find is page after page of specific and detailed fixes to both common and uncommon OS X problems. Ted Landau knows his stuff; he is probably best known for the creation of the MacFixit web site, and for his Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters. Sad Macs dealt with OS 9 troubles, and Mac OS X Disaster Relief is a more-than-worthy successor.

There's no fluff in this meaty book. My brain was working overtime on many pages, thinking about the variety of different problems and solutions. Landau devotes comparatively little space to OS X overview, except in places where a fundamental understanding of OS architecture is needed. While there is the usual discussion of Aqua, and OpenGL, the bulk of Chapter 4, Understanding Mac OS X, is spent on a thorough exposition of the contents of /Library and /Users/"Home"/Library. Each folder, beginning with Application Support, and ending with StartupItems, is covered in detail. While this information could be found by consulting MacFixit, Macintouch, Apple's KnowledgeBase, Mac OS X Hints, and Google.com/Mac, your Mac would be obsolete before you found it all. Mac OS X Disaster Relief is the best compendium of "what part does what job" I have ever seen for OS X.

Before reading Mac OS X Disaster Relief, I thought I knew a bit about OS X. I should, after plowing through over a dozen OS X books, each one saying it is the best in the field. But Landau is the first to say OS X has at least 7 ways of crashing at startup. (Apple does like to give the user flexibility...) Chapter 5, Crash Prevention and Recovery presents the startup sequence in slow-motion detail, and you learn exactly what happens (and what can go wrong) at each step in the process.

Crash problems are mercifully left behind when you arrive at Chapter 6, Problems with Files: Open, Copy, Delete, and Beyond. One of the first "gotchas" that drives an OS X newbie to run screaming from the room in frustration is the inability to empty the Trash, or to even put files into the Trash. Fixing Trash headaches is kid's play for Landau, and you'll learn several ways to solve this problem.

The best part of Chapter 6 is the lucid discussion of aliases, symbolic links, and hard links. Not being a Unix geek, I never understood the differences between these three "pointers to files" and how they differed from Mac OS 9 aliases. Landau set me straight in less than a page.

I could easily recite how useful the Troubleshooting Printing, and Troubleshooting Networking, File Sharing and Internet sections are, but that would be redundant. Every section is good, with golden nuggets of knowledge throughout.

Obviously, I love this book; its the best OS X book I've read since I reviewed David Pogue's OS X The Missing Manual. My copy of this masterful work is already dog-eared, and I've had it only three weeks. Mac OS X Disaster Relief is a MUST addition to any OS X user's library. You can read it straight through, from start to finish, as I did, or you can use it as a reference for when you encounter trouble. Either way, it will be worth far more than what you paid for it, as Landau will certainly save you time, probably save you money, and maybe save you some hair loss.

MacMice Rating: 5 out of ...

Rating:
Summary: Great OS X troubleshooting book
Review: If you're looking for an OS X troubleshooting book this is it! Insight from the MacFixIt guru helps cure your OS X blues along with basic OS X info.

This book along with Mac OS X unleashed (John & William Ray) will help answer all your needs.

Rating:
Summary: Not just for troubleshooting
Review: Long-time Mac users will recognize Ted Landau as one of the best authorities in the business on how to keep your Mac up and running well. He brings his many years of experience and expertise now to Mac OS X. This book is chockfull of excellent advice on how to install OS X (including an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of partitioning), how to diagnose problems with OS X and with applications, how to recover from and prevent crashes, and how to troubleshoot all aspects of OS X.

But the book is much more than that. If you're interested in really learning about the inner workings of OS X, from the code manager to its unix underpinnings to Agua, this book explains in clear and precise detail. There's also a section on Classic: how to optimize it, how to keep it running smoothly, etc.

If you are only own one book on OS X, this should be it. If you're new to OS X, buy this one and Pogue's Missing Manual. The Pogue book will get you started. Landau's will keep you going! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Rating:
Summary: Work in Progress?
Review: Mac OS X should be considerably more reliable than earlier versions of the Macintosh operating system. But things still go awry from time to time, and users need a completely new set of skills to trouble-shoot the new OS.

Ted Landau's "Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters" is the standard trouble-shooting guide for the classic Mac OS. But Mac OS X is a very different animal, and it's obvious the author is still learning the ropes of the new operating system. The trouble-shooting advice in this book sometimes seems to employ a "shotgun" approach instead of the methodical zeroing in on a well-understood problem that marked the earlier book.

That's not to say there aren't some useful nuggets here. I've found the discussion of the many "Library" folders and their contents provides a useful starting point for my own trouble-shooting.

Like Landau's earlier book, this book often refers readers to the author's web site, for more up-to-date information. The site was once a great free resource for Mac trouble-shooting, but now almost all the site's resources are available only to paying visitors. Sadly, the book's many references to the site now feel like something entirely other than helpful advice.

Much like OS X itself, "Mac OS X Disaster Relief" feels like a work in progress. Perhaps the second or third edition will equal the quality of Landau's earlier book and earn the right to be called "indispensable."

Rating:
Summary: Fills a need...
Review: This book is designed for those that are already familiar with Mac OS X and are willing to attempt to solve problems that may crop up from time to time while running Mac OS X. It's about as far as you can go short of learning UNIX commands and working "beneath the hood" (although there is a chapter on some basic specific-task-oriented UNIX). If others have had the problem you are experiencing, chances are there is a solution in this book.
Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Fills a need...
Review: This book is designed for those that are already familiar with Mac OS X and are willing to attempt to solve problems that may crop up from time to time while running Mac OS X. It's about as far as you can go short of learning UNIX commands and working "beneath the hood" (although there is a chapter on some basic specific-task-oriented UNIX). If others have had the problem you are experiencing, chances are there is a solution in this book.
Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful hands on guide
Review: This is a tremendous book. It guides you through troubleshooting problems with your Mac so that you don't have to be at the mercy of over-priced, snot-nosed computer technicians with attitudes. There is a lot of good solid information to get you going and lots of tips and advise. You could call the book a survival guide to the latest phase of the computer age. Things always go wrong with computers (even Macs!) and this book is a great guide to getting out of trouble.

Highly recomended

Rating:
Summary: This Is An Old Edition!!!
Review: This Is An Old Edition!!! It is from July, 2003. Don't make a mistake and get this.

Make sure you get the 2nd edition of this book called Mac OS X Disaster Relief, Updated Edition. It was released in December, 2002. Do a search to find it.

Rating:
Summary: A little out of date but still has value
Review: This is one of those tough ones. On the one hand, there's a lot of good stuff here. On the other hand..

The problem here is that a LOT of this book was written about early versions of Mac OS X. Too many things talked about have changed and either work differently or don't work at all. In fairness, there is a section at the end that is newer than the rest of the book that does cover most of that, but if you are reading front to back you will have some disorientation.

Some of the problems just come from lack of basic Unix knowledge. I don't mean that there's anything too horrible here, just a few minor misconceptions and a general feeling that the author wants to avoid the command line at all costs. On the other hand, if you share his apparent dislike of command line work, you'll be pleased to find his more graphical workarounds.

The focus of this boook is troubleshooting, and even with the problems I have mentioned, it does cover all manner of problems, and attempts to give enough technical background to be interesting and educational - it's not just "Command Option blah blah fixes that"; the author does make the effort to explain what's going on underneath.

So, while I can't heartily recommend that you drop everything and rush out to buy this, it is a book you will find value in.

Rating:
Summary: BIG help for beginning and intermediate users
Review: When I was using OS 8.x and 9.x, I always referred to Ted Landau's Sad Macs, Bombs and Other Disasters for troubleshooting. About 95% of the time, my answer was there. Well, Mac OS X Disaster Relief is the OS X equivalent. And this updated version includes a "special Jaguar supplement," dedicated to solving problems in OS X 10.2.

I noticed on Amazon.com, that they mention the third edition of this book due out in September of 2003. I wonder if it will contain info on "Panther," OS X 10.3, which is supposed to be released around that time?

Many of you may know Ted as the creator of the MacFixit web site. In Mac OS X Disaster Relief, he covers the gamut from how to solve common problems, to rare ones, to geeky things like editing your preferences files to turn off blinking cursors. Or make files invisible (or vice versa). Though this is definitely an OS X book, he does tell you how to troubleshoot a few OS 9 things that may affect your OS X.

He devotes some pages to solving OS X crashes, and to the various disk repair utilities like Drive 10, Norton Utilities, etc. Interestingly, he seems to think it is safe to use Norton Speed Disk to optimize your hard drive (page 255). He also explains that this kind of optimization is entirely different from the kind of optimization that happens as part of an installation of software.

There is also a good section on internet and network troubleshooting. In that section, I think I may have found a solution I've been looking for. AppleTalk does not work when it is active on multiple ports (page 471). That may explain why I'm having trouble printing over ethernet.

In one section, he talks about backing up your OS X boot volume using 'ditto,' an app built into OS X. He further explains that Carbon Copy Cloner is just a GUI front end for ditto, for those who don't want to use the Terminal. And he tells you about other apps like 'psync' that will do the same thing.

This book tells you how to do a lot of very basic troubleshooting. If you want to get under the hood and dink around (technical term), customize, or troubleshoot at a deeper level, it will help you do that, too.