I was attracted by T-Mobile’s new £15/month offer (first three months £10) with the new Mobile Broadband USB Stick 620 (capable of HSDPA 7.2). The box clearly states “Mac OS X v10.4.x or above”. However, when I installed the supplied software on my nice new Macbook Pro (which came with Snow Leopard, that is v10.6, installed) my system was rendered unusable on the next reboot. I am extremely grateful to David Glover for his workaround.
To get my machine back I had to …
1) boot in firewire target mode (hold down T while powering up)
2) attach to another Mac using a firewire cable
3) download the libcurl.4.dylib archive from David Glover’s post
4) install the above file in usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib on the target machine
5) unmount the target machine
6) boot the target machine normally (it works)
But to get the T-Mobile broadband to work again I had to …
1) save a copy of the “good” libcurl.4.dylib
2) run /Applications/T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager/Uninstall_T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager.app
3) insert the USB stick
4) run the installer from there (I had previously used the CDROM that came with the stick)
5) copy the “good” libcurl.4.dylib back into /usr/lib
6) restart T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager
I have a call outstanding with T-Mobile (who were unaware of the problem), and will post an update as and when the fix the problem. It is astonishing that third party software should overwrite vital system files! As of now I don’t know what else they’ve broken, although I was alarmed to find other files in /usr/lib with the same timestamp …
$ ls -l /usr/lib/ | grep Feb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pgdh staff 163616 27 Feb 2009 bkLib.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pgdh staff 179412 27 Feb 2009 libAgent.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pgdh staff 208640 27 Feb 2009 libTinyXml.dylib
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pgdh staff 522284 27 Feb 2009 libcurl.4.dylib.broken
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pgdh staff 25464 27 Feb 2009 libmd5.dylib
$
More news as it happens.
Cripes! What other popular commercial operating system do you think they’ve had to deal with in the past to learn *that* behavior?
Thanks. You saved my day…
Pingback: How to fix Snow Leopard after T-Mobile mobile broadband has killed it :: Aaron Russell
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
I think T-Mobile are being less than honest about not knowing about this issue. A certain electrical retail giant was busy sending around an internal memo (at launch) that warned sales colleagues not to sell mobile broadband dongles with machines running OS X 10.6 because of compatibility issues arising from changes to the kernel. The same retailer still ships the Snow Leopard machines with 10.5.6 installed instead and the upgrade discs left in the box.
I’ve just had my shiny new iMac rendered inoperable by T-Mobile’s driver. Fortunately I’ve managed to repair it by reinstalling Snow Leopard (and the dongle still works after the reinstall).
It’s disgraceful that T-Mobile (who MUST know about this issue) continue to distribute this driver with their dongles which I bought new only yesterday. Frankly I’m speechless, what a disgrace, how many hours of inconvenience must this have caused??!!!
My 24″ iMac wont boot at all after installing the dongle software. Cant enter safe mode or do anything. Off to get this fix done tomorrow.
Given T-Mobile says compatible with 10.4x or above, and given that is not true and has resulted in damage (that will cost to repair) surely they should pay the cost of getting it fixed. I will see what they say.
I have the 120 dongle; it doesn’t work with Snow Leopard…
maybe it does… but i cannot get it to work with mine.
I fear I may have to downgrade to Leopard. Which i’d hate to do; but i need to get my £15 a month of mobile broadband internet really…
I’ve been using the previous Huwaei 160 stick with Snow Leopard but I had to download drivers from the Austrian T-Mobile site. T-Mobile UK were utterly useless at the time.
This discussion is interesting and disturbing; I hadn’t realised that T-Mobile’s installer was overwriting system shared libraries. I don’t expect or appreciate this kind of thing, and I’ll definitely treat their installers as untrusted from now on, doing before/after filesystem checks and replacing any over-written standard shared libraries with the proper ones – I’m not having T-Mobile (or anyone else) replacing my libs with either old versions, wrong versions or hacked/trojan versions or whatever the hell they think they’re doing.
Once you’ve gone to the trouble of persuading them to remove their ridiculous “content lock”, the service (and dongle) does seem to represent good value (and works well), but their attitude sucks.
Note for people who travel: These cheap dongles are subsidy-locked to T-Mobile. You can unlock them, but do so before travelling. I went into a T-Mobile shop in Germany and asked for a German T-Mobile 3G sim to use with my UK, locked-to-T-Mobile dongle and they said it would cost 80 euros, whereas a 3G-capable chainstore SIM cost me 10 euros with 10 euros credit, but of course couldn’t be used in the locked stick, I had to use a regular (unlocked) phone, and my phone isn’t 3G… I later found out that even a T-Mobile SIM won’t work in a UK locked dongle if it’s not a UK SIM.
Phew! Your info was a lifesaver… though it might be helpful if you included the command needed to reach usr/lib through Terminal, just on the off-chance that not everyone who needs help knows how to use it fully. I know Terminal isn’t something to be messed with by novice users, but if they’ve managed to find your post and boot in firewire target mode, they’ve made a good start.. it would be nice if they don’t get stuck at that point!
I don’t use really use Terminal myself, so it took a bit of hunting around to cobble together the line needed to do this.. it’s obvious in retrospect, but I really didn’t know how to do it before.
So, for anyone else who’s looking to fix their computer themselves, open Terminal.app (you can find it via Spotlight), and type in:
“open /volumes/yourHDnamehere/usr/lib”
(without the quotes, and replacing ‘yourHDnamehere’ with the name of the target drive)
..and then follow the rest of the instructions above.
One issue though is that if you haven’t renamed your harddrive from the standard ‘Macintosh HD’ (which I had), it may not open correctly due to the space in the name. However you can simply drag the disk in question onto the Terminal and it will put the name in for you, or you add a backslash to the space (so ‘Macintosh HD’ becomes ‘Macintosh HD’) and continue the rest of the command as normal.
Sorry if this seems a bit elementary to the rest of you on here, but I think it will save a lot of people some unnecessary grief hunting around the internet or taking their computers to the Genius Bar to have it sorted out. Especially if (like me) their Applecare has expired.. =S
Hope this helps!