Man reinstalls system to fix AirPort file sharing problem, accidentally fixes Aluminum Keyboard problem too

[Published Thursday, August 23rd]

One of the lessons we try to repeat from time to time here at MacFixIt is that reinstalling the system is not painful, not terribly time-consuming, and often a solution that just works. (See, for example, our tutorial on the subject.)

Part of the problem for users, though, is that it can be hard to convince yourself that reinstallation is really necessary. You've got some problem and you don't know where it is. Your mind is awhirl with questions and doubts: "Is it my computer or something else, such a peripheral or the network? If it's my computer, is it hardware or software? If it's software, will reinstalling the system actually fix it?"

It helps, in these situations, to let go of your emotions and become a ruthlessly logical thinking machine, like Spock on "Star Trek." It also helps to have on some spare equipment, which you can use for purposes of comparison. In the right frame of mind and with the right equipment, you may be able to hone in on the problem with sufficient force that reinstalling the system starts to look so necessary and so likely to help that your resistance is overcome.

A very nice case in point comes from reader Dave, who starts his story by describing the problem, as follows:

I run a small business in the UK called [name removed to protect everyone from everything], selling and supporting Apple in the UK, and being a typical Mac geek, I like to get my hands on Apple products to get a feel for their strong and weak points. Last week I installed a new AirPort Extreme (gigabit) unit for a customer and was so impressed by the functionality I discovered that I decided to buy one outright and spend more time understanding how the product works. Of particular interest to me was the USB sharing of printers and disks, and this is one area I have been focussing on. Imagine my surprise and horror to find that my trusty G4 PowerMac could see the shared drive, but when trying to connect to a file share using the network browser I'd be greeted with some data in afp "blah blah blah" cannot be read or written, error -36.

So I tried connecting to the file sharing server by directly inputting the afp:ip address. Same problem: I could get to the list of shares, but when I selected one and tried to connect, up came error -36.

I then tried entering afp:/ip address/share name. The error message changed to cannot mount the share.

So I then tried smb:/ip address, and I could mount the share!

So much for the problem. He's getting a series of errors when he tries to connect to a disk shared via the AirPort Extreme base unit. He can mount the disk by specifying the SMB protocol, but having to do this makes no sense since it isn't a Windows machine.

Now, Dave's first response is to run in circles, sacrifice a goat, and roll in the dust. Okay, not really; after all, any of these preliminary attempts at a solution might have helped, and can certainly do no harm:

I started to hunt around for clues and tried all the fixes I could find on the Web, to no avail. I repaired file permissions, ran fsck, then applejack. Still no fix.

At this point, however, Dave rises to the demands of the occasion and suddenly transforms into Spock, and begins eliminating possibilities in a ruthlessly logical manner. This, as you'll see, is where the extra equipment comes in handy:

Faced with the question "is the fault my Mac, the Airport or both?", I decided to see if other Macs and PCs in the shop had the same problem. They did not.

So on a whim I created a brand new OS X install on a firewire drive for my G4 and it now connected in all modes successfully.

Bingo. First, he proves that the problem lies in just one computer; he has other computers and they are not experiencing the problem. So it's the G4, not the network. Then (and this is the really neat part, I think) he does a dry run of what it would be like if he just happened to reinstall the system: he installs the system on a separate partition (an external firewire drive) and boots up from that. We cannot stress sufficiently that having a clean copy of your current system on a separate partition is always a Really Good Idea. (Rank it right up there with that other Really Good Idea, having a backup.) You can use the clean system to boot up from in an emergency, and, as Dave does here, you can use it to prove that something about your own system is at fault, because the clean system doesn't misbehave in the same way.

Okay, back to Dave's story, where he is actually starting to sound a bit like Spock:

Conclusion: at some time my old G4 system has somehow become confused and/or corrupted.

Going to the next level, I backed up the G4, wiped the drive, installed a fresh copy of OS X, performed a data migration and now the Mac is back, all data safe and no more error -36 messages! Moral of the story, if all else fails and anecdotal evidence shows that it should you sometimes have to bite the bullet, start from scratch and re-install OS X.

Quite so - although Dave may have gone a little far here. Unless the hard drive itself is structurally corrupt, there is probably no need to back it up and wipe it in order to reinstall the system. A simple Archive and Install, as instructed by our tutorial, would probably have been sufficient.

The important thing, though, is that Dave was willing to proceed through all the pain, real or imagined, of a system reinstallation, because he had done enough preliminary testing and reasoning to persuade himself that this would be very likely to fix the problem.

The story should be over at this point, but as it turns out, just as in a Ron Popeil advertisement, there's more:

One additional benefit, my brand new aluminum keyboard which was exhibiting the non-functioning dashboard and exposé keys (F4, F3) even after the apple keyboard update, now works!

Fascinating, Captain! We've already seen a suggestion that the non-functioning Dashboard and Exposé keys in aluminum Apple Keyboards can be fixed in software by reinstalling part of the system (the Dock, in the article linked to); now here comes Dave and confirms this from another direction, discovering that his keyboard is working properly as an unexpected side-effect of a complete system reinstallation! This is a truly powerful argument for system reinstallation: it can fix more than the problem on which you were concentrating on that moment. You people who are having trouble with the new Apple Keyboard, if you're not willing to try reinstalling the system, at least try booting up from a clean system on a separate partition and let us know if that helps.

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