When Software Updates Attack
So, does this look familiar to you?
From the Applications/Utilities/Console application:
crashdump[326]: mdimportserver crashed
crashdump[326]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mdimportserver.crash.log
If so, you may well be suffering what I have of late. If you're not sure, then try the following: open up a terminal (in the Applications/Utilities folder) and enter "mdimport -L" and hit enter. This is supposed to list your Spotlight plugins, but I was getting an error telling me that Metadata.Framework was having issues with a lot of files called Schema.xml that were spread across my machine. There were two other ways that this was showing up on my machine; firstly Software Update no longer worked, instead crashing after ten seconds or so, and secondly if I opened Activity Monitor there seemed to be a CrashDump every ten seconds or so.
The problem for me was that lots of people had a similar issue, but not exactly the same, so when I searched on the web I got lots of help about something that wasn't happening to me. Most people seemed to have dodgy Spotlight Plugins, whcih showed up as error messages after the log snippet above. Something liek this (which I found on the web):
Mar 19 17:05:11 macminis-computer crashdump[294]: mdimportserver crashed
Mar 19 17:05:11 macminis-computer crashdump[294]: crash report written to: /Users/hexstar/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mdimportserver.crash.log
Mar 19 17:05:26 macminis-computer mdimportserver[296]: StuffIt Spotlight importer: Could not open the archive. Error: -39
But I wasn't getting that, so what was the problem? Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that I located the issue and fixed it. The bad news is that I needed another PowerPC install of OS X 10.4 to fix it. Luckily, I have been running 10.4.10 off an external firewire drive and hadn't deleted the 10.4.9 that was on my Mini's internal drive.
So anyway, the problem is with one of two things, so I replaced both with copies from 10.4.9 and now everything is fine. The first thing I replaced was the Metadata.framework. I did this because the CrashReporter/mdimportserver.crash.log was showing this:
Command: mdimportserver
Path: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdimportserver
Parent: launchd [1]
So I booted from my internal drive and copied System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework from my internal drive to /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks on my external drive and rebooted back onto my external drive. This itself didn't fix the problem, but for now I left it there.
Then I thought about the mdimport crashing and so looked at my mdimport.crash.log and saw that the thread that had crashed contained a lot of references to libxml. Libxml is stored in the /usr/lib folder, but that folder is usually hidden from use in the Finder so, again using the terminal, I copied all the files beginning with "libxml" from the /usr/lib folder on my internal drive to the /usr/lib folder on my external drive. Again I did this by booting into the 10.4.9 on my internal drive.
And suddenly everything worked. Software Update worked, mdimport worked and I was no longer seeing regular crashdumps in Activity Monitor. Hurrah.
I have to be honest, I have no explanation as to exactly what was going on. However, I now have a stable system and libxml appears to be happy now. This is all that matters to me! Even though I couldn't explain exactly what the issue has been, I thought I'd write this up and post it here in case it can help anyone else who is experiencing the same problems.
M Panda
