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I realise I've not blogged for a while (quelle surprise!) but given the fraught hour that's just passed, I thought now would be a good time.
It all started in the dim and distant past, with Diablo 2. A popular game that first came out about eight years ago, it ran on both PC and Mac operating systems, and has been updated to keep it running happily under both operating systems ever since.
Well, until fairly recently, where an updated graphics driver to the chipset of my notebook computer killed the 256 colour mode that Diablo 2 requires to run.
Anyway. Enterprising hackers realised they could downgrade the graphics drivers a notch, and restore the ability for Diablo 2 to run once again. Everyone wins!
And I was happy.
But another game I play an awful lot more (EVE Online) didn't really enjoy using the slightly older drivers and in fact loved the shiny new drivers. It was possible to work around this by opening up the game package and running cider from the command line, but I'd inevitably forget and end up with a blank screen, forcing me to quit, relaunch, etc. etc.
Also, the framerate was noticeably crappier.
Since I managed to get Diablo 2 working happily on XP under VMware Fusion, I decided to revert my drivers back to the "latest and greatest" and enjoy EVE at full pelt and without the startup workaround.
Now, the package that I originally used to downgrade my drivers also provided the facility to back out and revert to the new drivers. What could possibly go wrong?
A few quick clicks and a reboot later, it became very apparent that something had gone significantly awry. And I was left staring at a lifeless display. Because of the way networking starts up, I had no way of connecting to the machine. It was essentially transformed into a shiny and expensive paperweight.
So, I dug out the installation disks and prepared myself psychologically for a system restore.
I really didn't want to system restore. I spent many hours cleaning out the parts of OS X I didn't need to save space -- not only printer drivers, but also languages and localisation things I didn't need. A system restore would whack them right back in, and still leave me needing to upgrade my OS from 10.5.0 to 10.5.4, a download of considerable girth and time consuming to boot.
After booting up from the DVD ROM (the old hold-down the C-key on restart trick), I noticed for the first time that the installer has a 'Utilities' menu.
This was very interesting, as it opened up another path for salvation -- for one of the utilities was the 'Terminal' app. Running this provides root access to the volumes mounted on the disk, which included the partition with my broken drivers on it. Also of note was the fact that I could reattach my wifi network in the usual way. And so, a plan was hatched.
Unfortunately, there was a degree of fiddling and investigation. First of all, I needed to locate a source of non-broken drivers, which I found in the /System/Library/Extensions folder on my iMac. I then needed to copy them across.
Then came the first problem. The OS X installer mounts a bare-bones, read-only operating system at /, and scp wasn't there. So the next thing to try was "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/usr/bin/scp" to see if that worked. Success!
Actually, short-lived success, for as soon as you try to actually copy anything, it complains it can't find /usr/bin/ssh.
Now, I've long-known that ssh supports file transfers and that it is used under the hood, but I'd never actually used it in this capacity before. I'd only really ever used scp.
After confirming I could "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/usr/bin/ssh" into my iMac, I tar'd up the driver files I needed (keeping my fingers crossed that tar would run successfully when I needed it) and set about discovering how ssh could be used to transfer a file.
In the end, it was remarkably simple. I found an excellent resource here describing how to backup using ssh alone. I settled for the "ssh target_address cat remotefile > localfile" format and transfered my hopefully non-broken drivers across.
Untarring proved uneventful. But would my replacement drivers work?
Yes. Rebooting bought up a very welcoming log-in screen. And a great big sigh of relief on my part.
There is probably a cautionary tale buried in here somewhere.