Friday, June 5, 2009

PGP WDE/Firmware Incompatibility?

I was just getting ready to leave for the day and my Mac announced that there were updates available. So I thought that I may as well go ahead and wait the extra 5 minutes to do the updates before heading out. After the update, the Mac would no longer boot. It starts up, puts up the PGP WDE screen, then after typing the password, it shuts down. Thinking that this was just a fluke, I tried restarting the machine several times and got the same behavior. So now, I'm restoring from a Time Machine backup. Fortunately, it is from 4:00 this afternoon so lost data is pretty much limited to a couple of email messages. Still, it's pretty annoying. I'm told that one of the things updated was the firmware and maybe there is some incompatibility with the WDE (whole disk encryption) software that I am running. I sure am glad that I am running Time Machine or this would have been a real drag. It is in the process of restoring and I still have 3½ hours 'til it's done. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to have a backup. On a Mac, Apple made it really simple.

Update - The restore got done around 9:30PM and after booting, the OS wanted to install the update again. Since the drive was no longer encrypted, I went ahead and applied the updates. This time no problem at all. I guess the problem was WDE and the firmware upgrade. I was thinking of holding off on updating the Mini9 but maybe I'll go ahead and give it a shot (after backing up of course).

This afternoon, I managed to fit in a 4 mile walk before it started to rain. I'm not real sure why I feel so run down but I am pretty sure that I won't be setting any records this month. I have a short trip to Barrow coming up and a trip to the Cisco conference at the end of the month. Now that I'm not teaching the CCNP classes anymore, I'm a bit disconnected with what's going on. I used try and make Cisco Networkers as it has by far the most real content. A lot of conferences have a lot of vendors saying how great they are but here they have a tremendous amount of technical content. I noticed on the registration that I am a "NetVet" this time around. I guess I've been to enough of these.

No comments:

Post a Comment