Nightmare Leopard Install

Last night I bought Leopard from the SoHo store in NYC, got the t-shirt and everything. I also bought iLife '08.

After backing everything up, I inserted the disc and selected Upgrade. I chose to 'Upgrade' and decided to install everything except X11 (which I never use) and all the language packs.

After watching the install for a few minutes, I left it with the message 'Time Remaining 2 hours, 43 minutes'

After watching about an hour of Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, I took a peek at what was going on. There was no DVD activity and it still said 'Time Remaining 2 hours, 43 minutes'. Oh dear. Another 30 minutes later, same message, so I aborted the install.

On restarting everything, selecting 'Upgrade' again, it tells me, there is nothing to upgrade. Clearly it had already trashed Tiger (as expected) but not installed anything. Great.

So... lets try again. This time, clean install. My Saturday morning would now be spent restoring everything.

Within a few minutes, the machine appeared to go silent again. 'Time Remaining 55 minutes'. 45 minutes later, 'Time Remaining 55 minutes'.

What's going on?

I took a look at the log, and there was some error about UI0 trying to open a folder, that wasn't there. I am not that great with error logs, so I was not sure if the problem was on the DVD, or the HDD.

So, tried everything yet again. Format, install...

Again, nothing.

Finally, I just tried installing including X11, and it worked... flawlessly.

One thing, when it first booted up, my fans went crazy and the system crawled. After looking in th Activity Monitor, it looked as though the system updater was trying to do something. Launching it manually killed the CPU hog, and it promptly downloaded the Remote Desktop client, 3.4 or something.

So, I am in Leopard right now...

Office 2004 installed flawlessly, but there are 4 software upgrades from the CD sold in 2006, one of them quite large.

iLife '08 also installs with no issues, as you'd expect, but there are 150MBs of updates already. If you're on a slow DSL line, you're in for a wait.

But I have a huge complaint, something so significant for me, I am eyeing up my Tiger disc. The Dock.

OK, I don't think it is THAT ugly, but it IS laggy. I mean really laggy. It's as bad as the Jaguar Dock was on a 128MB G3 iBook in 2002. Bear in mind I am in a 2ghz Intel machine, with 2 gigs of RAM. I'd hate to see this on a 1ghz G4 or lower.

Maybe there will be a fix for this, but the Dock for me is a huge part of the Mac experience.

Also, the folders are all this awful shade of blue, with no funky pictures or bright colours on them. It's almost like a poorly installed skin.

OK, so I am sore about losing everything and having to restore my life... but Leopard has not impressed me so far...

I'm sure it'll grow on me.

Please please please, backup before installing this. Or wait for 10.5.1...

wow that sounds horrible, I'm happy i didn't go to King of Prussia last night to get my copy..I had totally forgotten about Microsoft Office, I don't have the install disc here at school, that would have sucked if I had done the clean install and lost word till the next time i go home...

3 A&I's in a row last night and not a glitch.

The Dock does lag a bit on my 1Ghz G4 iBook, but that doesn't surprise me. That machine also doesn't have the transparent menu bar, I assume since it doesn't support Core Graphics.

My Quad and my wife's iMac took exactly 43 min a piece to upgrade an my iBook took 55 min to do so, all 3 installs were 6.6Gb in size.

The system will be pretty laggy while Spotlight indexes/Time Machine backs up. Once that's done, restart your system and you should see some huge improvements.

If the new dock isn't your thing try this.

Emphasis added...

Zoolook said:

Please please please, backup before installing this. Or wait for 10.5.1...

Click to expand...

Repeat the words above until enlightenment is achieved. Then upgrade (or wait for 10.5.1).

So sorry your experience has not been very good Zoolook. I start on my path tonight with backups, hard drive switch to a new 250G unit, and then the install. I dread moving things into the new installation, only because I've done so many system installs in the past, most of them Linux. It's less about whether something will be broken and more about figuring out what is broken.

The dock sounds disappointing, largely because my Tiger dock is insufficient for my needs. Leopard was - and remains - a hope.

That's what early adoption is about though. We get the shiny and new for the price of some trouble. It's the bleeding edge.

Regardless, I'll endeavor to do nothing substantive on my new install until I'm sure it works sufficiently close to my needs. If it does, then great! I use it. If it doesn't, I pop the old 120G drive into my system, and I'm back to where I was before. (I'll also have a backup on my external drive in case something horrific happens to my old drive.)

mathogre, is that avatar Paris Hilton? Sigh...

leopard

sounds like you are hurtin - no wonder

i think after a few restarts leopard is beginning to run very smoothly here.

imac g5 went o.k. with a straight upgrade and its running nicely, but went through the blue screen of death with my macbook.

eventually shut it down after waiting for hours and nothing happening a booted up from the disc again and chose archive and install and it went through much faster without a hitch.

i like the new dock and the new mail stationery, disappointed that they don't give you ilife 08 as leopard with ilife 06 feels odd.

plenty of things to try out and get to like, make your own widgets another useless toy.

thousands of folk have problems on the install and i reckon its been messier
than panther to tiger

mac57 said:

mathogre, is that avatar Paris Hilton? Sigh...

Click to expand...

Hi mac57! No, it's not. At least I don't think it is. I really don't know what Paris Hilton looks like. (That's not a joke. I don't fit into pop culture very much. We don't even have cable, but we've got a butt kicking net connection! )

The image came from a site I found a couple years ago. I found her to be striking.

brendan67 said:

thousands of folk have problems on the install and i reckon its been messier
than panther to tiger

Click to expand...

I would disagree. This is, once again, a case where people don't go on-line and post long stories like Zoolooks when the install goes fine.

As far as compared to previous upgrades, not a shot. One of them, I think it was Tiger, was wiping peoples external FireWire drives because of a firmware/software compatibility issue. This one has been relatively painless with the work around being to do an A&I (as I recommended to begin with) or a clean install.

mathogre said:

Repeat the words above until enlightenment is achieved. Then upgrade (or wait for 10.5.1).

Click to expand...

I didn't back up anything on any of my machines and to be honest I never have as part of the upgrade process.

Guys...

I AM an early adopter... O know the risks. It's kinda exciting, but frustrating when things go wrong.

There is no excuse for a laggy dock on a 2ghz Intel machine... that's Vista territory. I have hopes it will improve with an update or as things settle down. I will return the DVD and ask for another copy, because I am worried that there may be a glitch on it, which caused the 3 aborted attempts when I chose a custom install.

I am restoring parallels and Entourage right now. It's going well. Restoring Logic, with all the paths and settings, will be a big project.

Espose has sped up int he last hour... I guess my HDD was still doing stuff. An hour ago it was a bit laggy, maybe it's caching stuff still.

baggss said:

I didn't back up anything on any of my machines and to be honest I never have as part of the upgrade process.

Click to expand...

Really?! Why not, if you don't mind my asking. I am so used to having multiple copies of files on different media and/or devices when upgrading, switching machines, or otherwise making changes to a system where the potential for real data loss is significantly above zero.

Switching RAM the other day from 1G to 2G didn't warrant more than an incremental backup, and that was perfunctory. Upgrading an OS to me however is completely different and represents a significant risk to all of my data. I probably go overboard anyway, but I couldn't imagine going without at least one full backup before an upgrade.

Your thoughts?

mathogre said:

Really?! Why not, if you don't mind my asking. I am so used to having multiple copies of files on different media and/or devices when upgrading, switching machines, or otherwise making changes to a system where the potential for real data loss is significantly above zero.

Switching RAM the other day from 1G to 2G didn't warrant more than an incremental backup, and that was perfunctory. Upgrading an OS to me however is completely different and represents a significant risk to all of my data. I probably go overboard anyway, but I couldn't imagine going without at least one full backup before an upgrade.

Your thoughts?

Click to expand...

To be honest, because I have never had an issue with any MacOS upgrade in the 13+ years I've been using the system(s), never. I learned long ago that much of the "conventional wisdom" for upgrades on any platform are simply hype, with Windows being the exception. That being said, it doesn't mean it never happens, it's just never happened to me. I run the Cron scripts monthly and actually look at the S.M.A.R.T status of my drives on a regular basis.

I would never even consider a backup for any sort of hardware change shy of a new hard-drive, and only then if I was not able to use CCC to clone the old drive to the new one. I've moved my profile to various machines and shed things that no longer work or that I no longer need along the way but have not backed up simply because the original system is always still there for use.

Apples A&I process has worked flawlessly since it's inception in 10.1 and I've relied on it to solve many a problem on various systems that I own. The fact that it really is a "clean" install that integrates my profile makes it the best of all worlds IMHO.

Heck, I've had my profile become corrupt and have simply created a new one, dragged things from the old one then let disc utility repair permissions and moved on. I've even had my hard drive fail on me (boot drive) and been able to recover all my data using relatively cheap software (cheaper than the price of a hard drive to back up too). In the end, it's never been worth the effort. Now I HAVE lost data. a chunk of my music collection, when both drives of my RAID array died at the same time, so much for redundancy.

I firmly believe that part of the problem is that too many people have become conditioned to expecting the worst ( I blame MS for this) and in the end create their own problems out their efforts to avoid them.

Am I playing with fire? Probably, but I am doing so with the confidence and knowledge that if I get burned it will be minor and not catastrophic. Knock on Wood.

Zoolook, I agree with you on the dock. I can say that this is not the case on my Quad or my wife's 2Ghx C2D iMac.

baggss said:

I would disagree. This is, once again, a case where people don't go on-line and post long stories like Zoolooks when the install goes fine.

As far as compared to previous upgrades, not a shot. One of them, I think it was Tiger, was wiping peoples external FireWire drives because of a firmware/software compatibility issue. This one has been relatively painless with the work around being to do an A&I (as I recommended to begin with) or a clean install.



I didn't back up anything on any of my machines and to be honest I never have as part of the upgrade process.

Click to expand...

i bow to your superior knowledge

but i still reckon there are more on line tales of woe this time round

baggss said:

I would disagree. This is, once again, a case where people don't go on-line and post long stories like Zoolooks when the install goes fine.

Click to expand...

Sure people are more likely to post problems than lack of them, but there are plenty of posts on this forum with people saying they upgraded, no issue as well.

My point is that my install failed using a custom option... would be interesting to see if that affects anyone else.

Thank you! I guess that supports the philosophy of the Mac being no more difficult than it needs to be.

Bought the Family Pack, 4 installs (2 upgrades and 2 clean) went absolutely flawless. All macs are speedy and working just fine.

activeseven said:

Bought the Family Pack, 4 installs (2 upgrades and 2 clean) went absolutely flawless. All macs are speedy and working just fine.

Click to expand...

Good good.

I just restored parallels, it works fine for Win XP and SuSE Linux on Leopard, which is great news.

I hate computers. It is after 2AM here and I am posting from my Dell tower running WinXP Pro. My Mac is okay. I just hate computers. I am the nightmare made manifest and am the cause of most of my problems.

My goal for this night was to install both a new hard drive and Leopard. baggss' earlier posts helped. Thank you baggss! I was thinking from both a Windows and Linux perspective on how to install the two. Now, hopefully, I'm thinking more from an Apple and OS X perspective.

I started by creating an image of my old hard drive using Disk Utility. Next, I switched hard drives, which was easy. Then I did a clean install of Leopard. That installed well, except I began to worry how well things would copy/restore on the new system. On the old, my home directory was /Users/grahamkg while on the new one it was /Users/mathogre. It hardly mattered. For whatever reason, Disk Utility under Leopard didn't recognize the disk image on my external hard drive. Then the penny dropped. I'd do best to restore my system to the new drive before installing Leopard.

I love wiping OSs. I've done it so often. My last "go-around" with Linux involved the installation of 5 or 6 current versions of the top distros. Now I've gone OS X, or at least I'm part way there. It isn't enough to translate from Linux or Windows to OS X. One must think in Apple and OS X.

At the moment my prior image is being checked and will subsequently be installed on my MacBook. Assuming all goes well, I'll check it out for a couple days to ensure stability. Then I'll back up the system and do the Archive and Install.

Fwiw, this is the first time I've really had bad words about my MacBook and OS X. My guess is that this will pass quickly. I'll be happy when it has passed.

Glad I was able to help, even if just by presenting a different perspective.

To be honest here, the easy way to do this would have been:

1) Use CCC to clone boot drive (10.4) to new HDD making sure to set it as bootable drive.

2) Swap to new HDD in place of old drive.

3) Boot from DVD and run repair permissions and disc utility.

4) Boot from new drive with cloned old system to make sure it worked.

5) Do an A&I 10.5 upgrade.

I've done steps 1-4 several times.

The only hitch I can see is that you would need to have an external case for the new drive. If you already had an external drive you could simply have cloned to it and then cloned it back to the new drive once it was installed, always keeping the original drive safe and pristine just in case you needed it.

mathogre said:

It isn't enough to translate from Linux or Windows to OS X. One must think in Apple and OS X.

Click to expand...

That is a great quote! I remember when I first switched from Windoze that I was actually thinking in WinXP and then doing the corresponding action in OS X. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped doing that and now I DO actually think in OS X. Ha Ha, I'm like a Universal Binary! I run natively on Intel-based Macs!!!