Tuesday 24 May 2011

T-Mobile dongles and Snow Leopard: not quite Plug and Go

These dongles from TMobile are arriving with three-year-old clunky software (written 2008) that will not work properly with Snow Leopard 10.6. After installation you may find it works after a fashion, but upon restarting your Mac, the Mac will not start up at all, but stay stuck at the spinning gear for ever.

If planning to upgrade from Leopard 10.5 and you have been using one of these, I would recommend doing a clean install of OSX 10.5, so that the TMobile software is 'left behind', and then upgrade to 10.6. Otherwise this will become a bit of a pain to sort out. Though I expect you may be reading this page because it already is a problem.

After this happened to my Snow Leopard installation, I tried a reinstall of Snow Leopard but that didn't work. The only way I could deal with it was to restart my Mac in Target Disk Mode, hook up to another Mac, delete everything but the Users folder. I then reinstalled Snow Leopard, which found the existing Users folder.

[Update 27th May]
There is a much better solution to this than mine, which I haven't yet had to try out. It involves copying a file from a regular 10.6 installation into a specific folder on the troubled Mac. He uses a complex method to get the file over, but you should be able to have it locally on a USB drive too.

Here is the site: T-Mobile 3G Dongle and OSX Snow Leopard : Mike Hughes

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