I had the rather unpleasant experience of trying to update to 10.4.9 last night, which crashed and left my computer hang on bootup. Trying to boot with cmd-s gave me this nice message:

Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying

/sbin/mach_init Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88

Fortunately, after reading this blog entry, I managed to recover doing something like this:

  1. Started my MacBook with a FW-cable from another computer.
  2. Downloaded the Mac OS X 10.4.9 Combo Update from Apple.
  3. Ran the installer on my other computer but chose to install on the drive of my MacBook.
  4. Booted back in on my MacBook

Only thing is that Max/MSP doesn’t want to start, even after reinstalling it, but hopefully someone figures out how to fix this in not too long.