[SOLVED!] Help please! I broke my 10.5.3 - frozen USB KB/mouse

[roses]

My only stable and working OS X installation is (past tense: was) a Leopard 10.5.3 on an 80GB SATA HDD - and I went and broke it.

 

I mistakenly applied a file called USBFix.pkg cos I was having problems with the USB ports. (I only realised later that it was the USB stick that was at fault as the file system was corrupted/damaged and it wouldn't mount properly - it just needed reformatting.........but I thought the OS was the cause.)

 

I got this package from a Snow Leopard distro DVD (Hazard 10.6.6i I think) which was another silly thing to do. It had worked successfully on a 10.6 install on another hard drive. But I told myself afterwards: Why would a 10.6 package necessarily work on a 10.5 OS??

 

At the time I applied it, the USBFix seemed to have no effect and the OS kept on running normally. But as soon as I rebooted, the system reaches the desktop but all USB devices (KB & mouse included) refused to be recognised and are frozen. I can boot into safe mode (-x) but cannot login without the KB. (My Dell has no PS/2 ports at all BTW. Edit: I just found an old Microsoft serial mouse - should be in a museum really - but that doesn't move the cursor on the desktop either. Not sure if it is working anyway, and got no other means to test it.)

 

I can view the contents of this drive via a Sharkoon USB-SATA interface from another drive in my Dell Optiplex which is running OS X. I can also see the files if I plug in the HDD to my PC which has MacDrive.

 

So please can someone tell me which file(s) I need to delete (and where they are located) remotely? Preferably in the next 12 hours or so as this is urgent.

 

Thanx in advance.

 

Edit: Also tried USBBusFix=Yes at boot prompt, also to no avail.

[roses]

Please don't reply to this post. The thread is now in Leopard 10.5 Post-Installation. Thank you.

[roses]

Well, it looks like my copied post in 10.5 Post-Installation has been deleted, so I'll guess this thread will have to stay here.

 

[sOLVED!!!!]

 

Oh my goodness, you've no idea how many things I tried before I got to this solution. If I told you just a few of them, you would be rolling around the floor laughing for days on end. It's just too embarrassing to even admit some of them. You can tell I'm a noob, just by the wrong things I do before I fix a problem.

 

But I don't like being spoon-fed and if I can I try to find my own answers to what seem truly insurmountable problems. Let that be a lesson to you, young man!! But I sometimes feel as if I'm trying to fight my way out of a black sack in a coal cellar in the middle of the night - while in a straitjacket.

 

This is what I did.

 

Using my Sharkoon USB-SATA adapter, I connected the 'damaged' drive (80GB SATA) to that.

(If I hadn't had this adapter, I've no idea how I could have achieved a solution. How can you mend a broken install if you can't use a KB or mouse and your computer has no other ports?)

In the Dell I put my 64GB SSD. At the time of the damage, this drive also had a work-in-progress broken install but it wasn't so important to me as preserving the Leopard 10.5.3. So I had to hurriedly erase and install a SL 10.6.2 to the SSD. (That took a couple of tries before I got it stable enough to do what I needed.

After bootup, I switched on the Sharkoon and was able to see the 80GB on the desktop.

By going into the directory structure, I navigated to a folder called Backup. The time and date of it corresponded to when I tried my little USBFix.pkg experiment yesterday which went sadly wrong. The two USB kexts inside it, in my case IOUSBFamily & IOUSBMassStorage, were obviously what I needed to restore to the Extensions folder. I copied both of these to the Desktop of my currently running SL 10.6.2 on the local drive.

By going into Systems>>Lib>>Extensions of the remote damaged drive, I was able to locate the same USB kexts and noticed they had a date much later than the ones in the Backup folder. This is possibly why they were incompatible with 10.5.3. I deleted those by dragging them into the trash.

Now to get the new kexts into place. Please note newbies, you cannot just drag or copy & paste kexts into the Extensions folder. You have to use a utility such as Kext Utility or Kext Beast. However, AFAIK Kext Utility ONLY works on kexts on a LOCAL drive. KB can be told to install to different locations.

This is what I did now. KB is easy to use. You put the kexts you want to install on the desktop, run the program, and in my case I clicked on "Change Install Location" and chose my remote damaged drive.

Soft-eject the remote drive (as you would and should do for any other USB device) by right-clicking its icon on the desktop. Turn off power to the Sharkoon. Shut down the Mac.

Swapped out the 64GB SSD in favour of the 80GB, Rebooted and hey presto, KB & mouse working again.

(In truth, it took a couple of goes doing this. First few times I got an error message on the 10.5.3 desktop saying a kext had been improperly installed, but without a mouse or KB as they were still frozen I wasn't able to acknowledge it.)

 

 

But can someone more experienced than I am tell me how I would have achieved all of the above if I only had one (damaged) drive and no adapter.