Mac goes mad - Leopard Woes and general fears

Hi there,

I've been a Mac user for a year now and have never had any operating issues. Then comes the new Leopard disk and things go awry.

I'm not going to go into too much detail as I'll bore you to death but here's a quick summary of my problems / issues.

1. Try to install Leopard. It fails.

2. Try again and it tells me that it can only install if the hard drive is wiped. I abort.

3. Now this is what is confusing me. When I run Disk Utility and verify my hard drive it says everything is fine. No problems. But when I boot up from the Leopard disk and run disk utility on my hard drive, it says that:

First Aid failed. Disk utility stopped. Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Incorrect number of Extended Attributes (It should be 0 instead of 8346)


I have no idea what that error means or how it came about. Is it a...virus? I'm using a Macbook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz which is only a few months old.

I cannot repair the disk at this point.


4. I have no idea if there is a workaround for this one. If not, I suppose my other option is to erase the hard drive and replace it with the cloned version from external HDD. Trouble is...I'm terrified of doing this. I terrified that if I erase everything I'm just relying on the external to put it back. I know people do this all the time but it sounds scary. Can anyone reassure me?

And how do I erase everything. Do I just delete the disk and will that retain OSX?

5. Oh Leopard, how could you do this? Such sweet promise, but so far you have mauled my heart like the wild beast you are.

Your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.

Sorry to hear of your troubles. I know that this is going to be of no comfort to you, but my upgrade to Leopard went without a hitch. I got the disk on saturday put it in the drive followed the on screen instructions and about two hours later that was it. No problems so far. Hope you get it sorted out soon.

Thanks Sysopsv2. Glad it went well - I was hoping it would be smooth for me too. Alas not.

Shark Trager said:

4. I have no idea if there is a workaround for this one. If not, I suppose my other option is to erase the hard drive and replace it with the cloned version from external HDD. Trouble is...I'm terrified of doing this. I terrified that if I erase everything I'm just relying on the external to put it back. I know people do this all the time but it sounds scary. Can anyone reassure me?

Click to expand...

Is your backup disc Firewire or USB 2. If Firewire, this is easy, if USB 2 it's not.

It's USB 2.0.

I have done a little digging and the Disk Utility problem seems to be flagged by the Leopard Disk and not my hard drive because this is something that Leopard notices and Tiger doesn't. I've read that if I partition my hard drive it might solve the problem. Is this a good idea? Or should I go into the Apple Store and get them to run Disk Warrior (I can't afford it)? Plus I really want Leopard NOW!