Mac OS X 10.5.6: booting into Setup Assistant; battery menu problems

Booting into Setup Assistant When Leopard was first released, updates would cause the setup assistant to open when users restarted. While Apple has addressed this issue in the past few updates, the problem has recurred for some users.

Apple Discussions poster Jim Dysart writes:

"I just completed the 10.5.6 update through Software Update process. When the computer restarted, it opened Setup Assistant with a blank form."

When this occurs, the behavior will not hurt the system, but users may have to force quit the setup assistant to close. This problem seems to occur because of some permissions problem, and in many cases has been fixed by starting up in Safe mode and running system and disk checks. When the system boots into Safe mode, several disk and filesystem maintenance routines are run.

Fixes: Run Disk Utility in Safe Mode Boot the computer while holding shift to get into "Safe" mode. Then open Disk Utility and run both a permissions fix on the boot drive, as well as verify the drive. Then reboot the system.

Battery menu not working properly After updating to Mac OS X 10.5.6, some users are noticing that some menubar options are no longer present. In some instances there have been hardware bugs preventing some of these menus from displaying, but for others there seem to be some missing options.

Apple Discussions poster lawrenced writes:

"After updating to 10.5.6 I noticed that my battery icon menu in my menu bar changed. It no longer gives me the option of "fast switching" to different energy modes (i.e. Normal, Better Battery Performance, Custom) as it did in 10.5.5."

It seems this problem with the battery menu is a truncated feature in OS X 10.5.6, where Apple has removed it (most likely inadvertently). Perhaps this is just a bug in the update and will be added back in a future update. Until then, it is recommended that users notify Apple about this missing feature and request they add it back at the OS X feedback site (http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html).

Spotlight not indexing Some users have had an issue where one or all disks in the system will not get indexed for spotlight searching. This has occurred for users with past updates and other software installation, has occurred for some uses with the recent 10.5.6 update.

Apple Discussions poster Jaoc writes:

"All our files are stored on a server...After updating one iMac to 10.5.6 spotlight no longer searches the shared volume. Can access it manually no problem though."

Some users have suggested adding the affected disks to the "Privacy" list for Spotlight, since this technically should delete the spotlight index on the drive. Removing the drive from this list then should allow the computer to remake the index. However, this does not properly occur in some cases. In order to fix this problem, users should manually reset the spotlight index using the terminal.

Fix: Manually reset spotlight indexing. Open the Terminal application and at the pormpt type the following command:

• sudo mdutil -e -i on

With this text entered (and ensuring a space is after the last character) drag the mounted disk that will not index to the terminal window, and the command should complete with the file path of the disk, as such:

• sudo mdutil -e -i on /Volumes/diskname/

Then press enter, supply the administrator password, and the index should be rebuilt.

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