I’ve Been Attacked by a Leopard
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It’s now been about 2 weeks since I installed Apple’s Leopard on my two Macs, and without a doubt this upgrade is the worst OS upgrade experience I’ve ever had. I think that’s saying something - I survived Windows 98, however many iterations of XP there were, and fled to the Mac in part because I was tired of spending so much time on forums and technical support pages trying to get my systems to work as advertised.
Well, I’m back on the forums. From start to finish, this experience with Leopard has been a complete nightmare, and I’ve needed a lot of research and help to get me through it (conservatively, I’ll estimate about 100 hours of time spent trying to fix things so far) - and it’s still not over; there are still several issues I’m trying to resolve. I’m sticking with the Macs, but my trust in Apple has been beaten soundly about the head and shoulders, and I’m going to be a lot more careful about early-adopting Apple products in the future. Comments are open, so go ahead and say I told you so. But first, walk in my footsteps for a little while as I set the scene.
Step 1 - enthusiastically open the Leopard box and insert DVD into Mac #1, a MacBook Pro. First mistake: even though I have a full backup, it’s a couple of days old. But I don’t freshen it up, because nothing ever really goes wrong with a Mac, right? Not so much. The install screen that asks where I want to install Leopard says I have no hard drives. This will come as a considerable surprise to my Mac. I reboot and retry - a few times - with the same result. The forums report that this is a common problem and a number of fixes are suggested. I go through several of them and after about 3 hours I find one that works.
Step 2 - based on advice from a number of sources, I install using the “Archive and Install” feature - this does a fresh install but saves all your apps and files to a folder so you can add back in whatever you want to keep in the new system. Except that after the several hours it takes to install, I’m presented with a screen telling me that the install failed. I reboot, and my files - everything - have disappeared. Leopard, however, is on my Mac. I think it’s laughing at me. It’s going to be a long night.
Step 3 - I spend several hours looking for my files. I notice that there are about 50 gigs of disk space unaccounted for, so I go online looking for info about hidden files. I find a terminal command to reveal them, and after digging down through many layers of directories I find my files - most of them, anyway. Between the files I’ve just found and my backup, I’m up and running after about 5 hours of work. I reboot to get a fresh start, and when the Mac restarts there is a question mark on the screen. I’ve heard about this question mark - it means the rest of my day is shot, because the Mac can’t find an OS to startup from. Yes, my Mac is definitely laughing at me.
Step 4 - I reinstall Leopard, this time choosing a simple upgrade. How one can upgrade an OS that isn’t there, I don’t know, but the Mac seems unaware of this inconsistency. After several more hours, the upgrade is complete, and I’m back to where I was at the end of Step 3.
Step 5 - my keychain is gone, so I start rebuilding it. I can’t access email, because my account info was on the keychain and in an encrypted passwords file. I contact the vendor of the encryption app, 1Password, from a web form on their site, and with their (very excellent) help I restore my backup. From one task to the other, I spend several more hours getting up and running.
Step 6 - I try to get a video chat with iChat AV going with a friend. It worked fine on Tiger, and we’ve both upgraded to Leopard. It won’t work. I venture online and find many posts from people with the same problem. Different solutions are offered, from tinkering with port forwarding on the router to banging your head against the wall and screaming. None of it works for me.
Step 7 - Now that I’m back up and running, I spend some time cleaning up old backups and the like on an outboard 320G USB drive I use. I built the drive myself with a simple enclosure and a nice Western Digital drive and it’s been an Old Faithful for me. I move all of the files off of it so I can partition the drive with Apple’s Disk Utility. The partition fails, and I get an alert telling me that there’s been a disk input/output error. I try it again, and again and again. I try everything. Same result. Again, I go online. I don’t find much (perhaps because the disk worked until I tried to erase and partition it, something people would generally do only rarely), but after some digging I find a few posts that suggest that Leopard may not work properly with some USB controller chips. I haven’t wanted to know anything about USB controller chips since 2004, so I spend some more time banging my head against the wall. Later, after the crying, I find a post that suggests that the drive can be restored using Western Digital’s disk utility, on a Windows machine, if the partition is formatted with FAT32. I try it, and it works. I try reformatting it on the Mac, and the disk fails. I don’t want FAT32 partitions, so the disk goes on the shelf until Apple issues a fix. I order a new drive - LaCie is having a big sale on eCost, and 500G-1TB drives are pretty affordable. I order the firewire 400 drive. Nervously I look at my other main outboard drive. Is it laughing at me? I start backing files up to DVD.
Step 8 - One of the things I couldn’t properly recover is my iTunes library - I have the music, and I have the library file, but for some reason iTunes can’t figure out where the music is. I’ve checked all my settings 18 ways to Sunday, and can’t figure this one out. That’s 100 gigs of music, laboriously tagged and starred and playlisted over about 18 months and sync’d to various iPods. Poof. Again, with the head-banging.
Step 9 - I try to add music to iTunes. Again, an error message. This time, I don’t have permission to access my Music folder or a file in it. I’m the admin on this computer, so that makes no sense. I check permissions, then repair them. No change. I can’t add new music to iTunes. This time I don’t even bother to go online. I’ll just wait a few days and see whether anything changes. Of course it won’t - but I need a break.
At some point, I suppose there will be a Step 10, 11 and so on. And there will probably be an OX 10.5.1 etc before too long as well. But whatever happens, this experience has soured me. I spent 20 years managing multiple machines through several iterations of MS operating systems and this is the single worst upgrade experience I’ve ever had. And it’s not over. I’m still a convert, but much less happily, and certainly much less credulously, so.
Update: Fake Steve Jobs is not impressed.
Updater: To its credit, Apple has released the rumoured update. It did this because, if you’ve read the comments to this post, I broke Leopard.
Updaterer: I wonder if I broke Scoble’s Mac, too.
Updaterest: Scoble unloads and gets hit with a busload of clueless commenters.
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…i scanned thru your article rather quickly…the clue to preventing (i am going on experience here with Leopard) is that the computer did not see any harddrive at the beginning of the install. Here is where you should have launched Disc Utility while booted from the installer disc and repaired permissions.
Unfortunately, most people (outside of the self-proclaimed Mac techies) probably are not aware of this “repair permissions” issue. I have upgraded 4 macs and ran into this with 2 (not seeing any harddrive). Thus far, I have had nothing but an extremely positive experience with Leopard on all my computers.
I did actually try that at the time, using Disk Utility running off the Leopard DVD as a boot disk. Thanks for the comment, though.
YIKES. Apple releases it’s first Microsoft-style upgrade? And this one took longer than the previous cats? Thanks, Rob, I’m going to hold on to my $129 until Apple sorts this out, possibly same time next year.
So what you are saying is you didn’t understand the install proccess, and then finally did an archive and install and yet didn’t understand how that worked either?
Why would you be using some idiotic, 3rd party password file when Apple builds this functionality into both Tiger and Leopard? What other obscure software have you installed?
I think you need to talk to the people at the genius bar, hire the ‘geek squad’ or ‘nerd herd’ or local high school kid to do this for you.
My 12 year old understands this stuff far better than you do.
I had a similar problem with Tiger… almost the same… i found the DVD to have actually been defective. It verified checksum… but something wasn’t right. I called applecare, they sent me a new disc and never had a problem since. (note: i did have to format and start all over again)… You may be having the same issue, borrow someone else’s leopard DVD and try it out.
I’ll keep away from Leopard after reading numerous horror stories around the web (and on Apple Discussions).
I wonder: all those distributed Leopard discs obviously have a troublesome installer on it - they’d need to upgrade the installer dvd to the x.1 iteration as well before I touch it.
What is it about being a Mac user that I want to reassure Rob that the kind of misery he describes here is pretty rare. But do I even know that for certain? I can only say it’s been rare for me, and I’ve installed/upgraded Mac OS 8-10.4 on so many different Macs I can’t remember them all now. In fact, particularly since the move to OS X, things have been pretty rock solid.
Still, when it’s you who is dealing with it, it doesn’t really matter how rare it is. The prior poster brought up a good point with repair permissions. I have in fact used that once before while installing; same issue- the OS disc couldn’t see any hard drive for whatever reason. I don’t claim to know why much of the strange stuff that happens with computers happens.. but I do know that I still enjoy using and working on (when necessary) Macs a heck of a lot more than Windows. And I will end by saying ‘Damn.. those MacBook Pros have got to be the nicest laptop Apple’s ever built, and easily nicer than any laptop built by any other company (IMHO).
Thanks for showing up, Brian. I so enjoy these talks we have together.
Comment to Brian: I’m not sure the average user should have to ‘understand this stuff’ to upgrade the OS. Especially not on a Mac. If advanced PC-knowledge is necessary, then Apple needs to promote it that way and offer that as a service available at one of their stores.
I’ve witnessed first-hand (working in the help desk/desktop support areas of an international IT services company) some really sharp, experienced people scratching their heads for hours over some of the crap that happens in and around computers. Unfortunately, it just comes with the territory. Thankfully, I think it just happens a lot less with Macs.
Here is the way I do it: (Note that no one that I know with sense assumes that every thing will go well during a backup. They all have their own processes as do I.) I first CLONE my drive to an external drive, all inclusive. Everything. Every scrap and file. Then I upgrade the external drive with the new OS and boot from it. I use it for a day or two and try not to generate new files located on the external drive, but either save to the internal or take a little extra care to not do a bunch of reconfiguring on the external drive. For example, through the test I either use webmail or leave my mail on the server so I don’t have it spread over two disks. After what I consider an adequate test I either upgrade the internal in a similar fashion or clone the external back to the internal drive, whichever seems most prudent to me. This accomplishes two things: I have a complete running backup of my upgraded drive which I can use if need be, and I have some confidence that the configuration will run correctly with my machine. One caution: some apps (most notably Final Cut Pro) won’t run from a booted external drive with the app on the external or using the copy on the internal drive. Final Cut Express will, last I checked. I have never gotten a good answer on that, but it is predictable, so no great strife. So far, on upgrades, I am batting 1000. And Leopard has been fine, aside from an intermittent issue with the keyboard which is being researched at the moment and is not terribly worrisome. Leopard has been purring for me. As it has with everyone I know who upgraded, so far. Sounds like you had some systemic problem for there to be that much issue with the upgrade.
Just commenting about the 1Password program. That’s an extremely useful program for automatically entering names and passwords into all sorts of websites where they are required. It’s simple one click and “you’re in”. You don’t have to go through multiple steps to get the info that may be stored in any other file on the system. It’s all there, right in the web browser.
In addition, it keeps credit card information with strong encryption and also enters that, too (in the appropriate slots) when making purchases and no one will even see certain keystrokes you make, with certain things being blanked out by bullets. Otherwise, it might even be possible for people to see your keystrokes visually (if they happened to be around).
Then it keeps all sorts of personal information in a note file, again in a highly encrypted state, right there in the same program.
Also, when making passwords, you no longer have to invent them or try to come up with something unique or whatever. The program will create it for you, using any combination of letter and other characters (or not, as you specify), and make it of any length that you specify (some websites require different sizes of passwords, too and limit some letters).
All that is wrapped up in one program. I can log-out of one website, jump into another one, out of that one and into another one, and a whole series of them in a row, doing it at extreme speed, with only a simply “one-click” from the browser bar and immensely speed up my accessing the many websites that do have name and password entry. I can do that as fast as I can “click, click and click” from one website to another. There’s nothing out there that beats this program.
From what you’ve said, here — Brian — you’ve simply shown your extreme ignorance about a program and it shows that no one should really ever listen to you again, from what you’ve demonstrated here. Thanks for letting us know to ignore you from now on.
1. Backup drive
2. Clean install Leopard
3. House clean old drive as you copy stuff over to new system
Been using it for weeks after doing this with NO problems.
I don’t have a lot to say about your experience except that you went at it the wrong way from the beginning. I do this for a lot of clients and I’ve found the best way to upgrade is to first just do the update and see how it goes. If everything starts getting screwy then you use a program like carbon copy to backup your system and wipe your drive. Installing everything from scratch can be a pain, but for the most part it guarantees the most happy sailing for any computer or system. The plus part of upgrading first off is that when you drag everything into your fresh new system it will be recognized and work properly. Of course you’ll still need to reinstall all your programs but that’s not too difficult.
OK, I just finished reading Steps 7, 8, and 9. This all truly sucks. I feel for you Rob. And obviously, you’re not a first-time, inexperienced ‘just go down to Best Buy and buy what they tell me to guy’. Which might make my suggestion all the tougher to consider..
What about making your way to the nearest Apple store (and doing what they tell you to :)) for some hand-holding? The stuff that is happening shouldn’t be, and they can can confirm/verify that, and suggest a next- course of action. Something in here- the OS disc, the MB Pro,..Leopard!!) is a dud, or at least is a dud when interacting with something else in this mix. Put all of your t-shooting experience and some of your pride off to the side, and reach out to our black-shirted brethern, my friend!
Ummmm…, Bryan, you don’t do the update - and then, afterwards - do the carbon copy backup. That’s totally and exactly backwards!! LOL!
You first clean things up on your system, run some maintenance, do your permissions checks, get things in order as much as possible, and then do the carbon copy (or use SuperDuper, like I do) and then check the validity of that copy, by booting from it and checking things out with it.
When you’re satisfied that everything is perfect and right with your backup drive - then you do the update. And if there is a problem with it, you simply restore from your backup you did - before - you did the update.
I sure hope - no one - ever follows your advice.
Sounds like you had a bum deal…. did you run disk permissions first then boot off the DVD? Then run Disk Utility on the installer DVD and run Repair Disk. We did this on just over 2 dozen machines and we’ve not had one hiccup in the entire process.
Sorry to hear you’re having these problems, Rob. Against my learned judgment on early adoption, I’ve installed Leopard on two MacBooks without any problems and plan on a third soon. Your experience is unacceptable, but I trust Apple will fix these issues shortly.
I installed Leopard on 5 machines. Mac Mini, 2 new silver iMacs, my Macbook Pro, and one of the older white iMacs. I haven’t had a single issue. Stop blaming Apple for your troubles.
I have no idea what the frequency of problems with Leopard have been, but it’s usually the case that people who have problems are the most vocal. For that reason, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve upgraded two macs (one Macbook and one 24-inch white iMac) to Leopard with zero problems. Both computers are fast and working great.
The average Mac user shouldn’t have to worry (or know) about file permissions or what to do if the installer doesn’t see a hard drive. All they should have to do is put the DVD in their drive, launch the installer, and follow the instructions on the screen. This is the Mac experience. If something goes wrong, the installer should know how to handle it and instruct the user accordingly. The fact that Rob experienced such a confusing and frustrating process is Apple’s fault, not his. At the very least the installer should have known how to handle the missing hard drive and offered to either fix the problem itself or, if that wasn’t possible, print a page of instructions on how to fix the problem.
Before I’m accused of being a PC fanboy, I’ve been a Mac user since 1984 and can’t stand Windows (despite being forced to use it on a daily basis at work). And fortunately the upgrades to Leopard I did on both my Macs went smoothly.
I had the same problem with losing my administrator privileges. If you check your Accounts in the System Preferences window you’ll probably find that you are now just a Standard User. The problem is the Root now has the administrator privileges. You must change the Root password, then give yourself administrator privileges. Boot up from the install disc and use the Tools menu to find Password Utility and give the Root a different password. The screen prompts should see you through the rest of the way. You’re right. this upgrade is almost as bad as the original OS X. I too have spent many hours trying to fix stuff.
First, Brian is a dick. It is easy to see that Rob knows more about computers than you give him credit for.
One SHOULD be able to trust Apple’s very own installer’s default process. Frankly, the installer should be repairing permissions and performing ALL CHRON tasks before the default “Upgrade” routine but it DOES NOT. We who have used Macs for a while know that the safest upgrade route has always been Archive and Install… and yet the installer defaults to Upgrade.
Rob, I sympathize with you. Sorry to hear of this Hell you’ve gone through. fwiw, it is indeed rare for things to go THIS BAD on an OS X install. Try and recover… and stay the course.
As for what “those in the know” would do — especially with mission-critical systems — is to follow the excellent advise of reader “Mark” — except that he’ll have to watch it with those “but either save (files) to the internal” while testing a new OS install on an external. If one forgets those unique files saved to the internal and clones the new, stable OS from external to internal… BOOM! New files gone. Other than that oversight, however, his is a sound approach.
And Bryan’s suggested process is erroneous — nay, dangerous!
For me, in a nutshell, I:
1) Research compatibility, 3rd party upgrades and stability issues FIRST.
After a few weeks, I would perform my first SuperDuper of the new OS, nuking the previous version on the external in the process. With Leopard’s “Time Machine”, however, my backup strategy will change.
2) Perform ALL disk, permission and chron tasks (using “Applejack”, fyi)
3) Back up entire drive to external drive as a bootable clone via SuperDuper.
4) Perform Archive and Install of new OS. test the hell out of everything for a few days, backing up new files to another device or using the .Mac Backup utility.
5) Usually, there is no Step 5
If I encounter a severe issue with the new install (never happened to me yet — touch wood), this approach gives you the flexibility to either nuke the new OS install and go FRESH or restore the previous version cloned in step 3.
My MacBook transition went seamlessly. I did a fresh Smart Backup with SuperDuper with a reboot off the FW external drive to confirm that my OSX Tiger volume was a fully functional stand-alone. Installed a Erase & Clean Install Leopard, then asked the Installation Manager to bring my files from “another computer”, which was my Tiger external drive. It took a while, but apart from an issue with 2 copies of Mail confusing Leopard all went well, no problems.
I have heard of another user who followed the same procedure who found that the Tiger volume was invisible to Leopard, possibly something to do with the way it was originally formated. No problem for me, YMMV.
The Mail issue was that Tiger’s Mail.app was not at the upper level of the Applications folder so when the Installation Manager transfered all my apps, it brought the ‘Mail ƒ’ over and parked it alongside the new Mail.app. Unfortunately the Dock icon pointed to the old copy of Mail inside the ƒ, which promptly crashed on launching. Sorted that fairly quickly.
people who suggest all these steps for upgrading are wrong.
you should just be able to put the disk in install and be in business. that is what I did with leo and it worked.
it seems like there are some bugs to work out in the process. as for the drive issue, I am not sure what to tell you.
rather than spend hours on this on forums, you can also, make an appointment at a genius bar in advance from home and go there, they probably have the real fix does not require a loss of data, that seems to me to be where the situation really went down hill.
also, with archive and install, wouldn’t something like your keychain be in the previous system archive?
Wow, now that’s a bit harsh to even speak of any Apple OS in the same breath as Windows 98! I too did an upgrade on my Tiger and I was running gasp File Vault and I ran into no problems. I ran into a problem when I did a dirty upgrade from Panther to Tiger. I keep a very vanilla system because I don’t like to run into problems so I am not sure if you may have installed some thing that might have caused a problems. But it’s tech 101 if you don’t want any problems on a new OS install then you start fresh with clean install and the same rules that apply in the Windoz world. I would never ever recommend you use a USB drive formated for Windows on your Mac for everyday use, seems to be asking for trouble. I do recommend that you take a look at the MacSales website they make a fine external OWC Mercury™ Elite Pro Classic Portable Solutions that has FW 800/400 USB 2.0 ports. Sorry I can’t recommend LaCie because of their external drives seem to have a high failure rate (as least for me). Last but not least your iTunes problem seems to be related to unix permissions problem. There are GUI tools you can download to correct the problem or you can correct the problem from the CLI (a better choice IMHO). Once you have that problem fixed you should be able to import your music back into your iTunes. Sorry to hear about your speed bumps!
Roz, we are NOT wrong, and you are ignoring the reality of Rob’s experience. Of course, it would be nice if you could just “put the disk in install and be in business”… it would also be nice if we all drove green cars, but with all due respect I hope that you’ll not find out just wrong you are if an upgrade goes south on you and you did NOT backup, first.
Don’t say we didn’t warn ya
Craig, no reasonable person would accuse you of being a PC fanboi. Your criticisms of the OS X installer are all valid.
Rob, may I ask why you didn’t simply revert to your couple of days old backup and forget about Leopard until 10.5.1 comes out? I mean, a hundred hours, counting, and still not done? I don’t get it. You strike me as smart, not hard headed. Why do you persist instead of waiting, given all this unnecessary pain?
“First mistake: even though I have a full backup, it’s a couple of days old. But I don’t freshen it up, because nothing ever really goes wrong with a Mac, right?”
No. No no no. Here’s what I did: I cloned my hard drive to an external hard drive using SuperDuper immediately before starting, then did an erase & install. Then, I used migration assistant to pull everything back over from the clone of the old system.
I had a bad experience a couple of felines ago & so I always do these things the long way. Safer.
Most people I know with Leopard have had it install flawlessly. About all i could really ding Apple for on this is not telling people, “This is the safest way to upgrade.”
Fact is stuff gets wonky in any OS when you’ve been using it awhile, and you’re always better off starting clean. SuperDuper does a nice cleanup before cloning (repairing permissions, etc.).
I’d also recommend Macaroni, a nice little utility from Atomic Bird that does regular housekeeping (like permissions repair, etc.) in the background for you. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and I think I’ve had fewer odd issues since I installed it.
Sorry you had such a terrible experience…
“So what you are saying is you didn’t understand the install proccess, and then finally did an archive and install and yet didn’t understand how that worked either?
Why would you be using some idiotic, 3rd party password file when Apple builds this functionality into both Tiger and Leopard? What other obscure software have you installed?
I think you need to talk to the people at the genius bar, hire the ‘geek squad’ or ‘nerd herd’ or local high school kid to do this for you.
My 12 year old understands this stuff far better than you do.”
All I see from Brian is an series of personal attacks, unsupported by facts, against anything and anyone that is not Apple. Nope. With you as a parent, I don’t think your 12 year old understands much of anything.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: The Leopard installer is programmed to sniff out signs of a PC personality–maximized windows, Firefox in the Applications folder, My Chemical Romance playing in iTunes, that sort of thing. If the user is determined to be a switcheur, it then proceeds to fuck up the installation.
Extreme measures such as these are meant to stem the tide of PC users pretending to be Mac users that have flooded the community in recent years. We don’t want you on our platform, and we regret that you misinterpreted Apple’s commercials and print advertisements as saying otherwise. So tell me, Rob: Are you a switcheur?
My upgrade experience on my Intel iMac was perfect. I plan to upgrade my other Macs (a G4 iMac and a MacBookPro) too. I have to wonder if something wasn’t wrong with your Mac before you started the upgrade process. Is there any way you can rule that out?
The reason the simple upgrade is the default is that at least historically, that almost always worked fine.
I guess Apple did not expect more than usual problems, and honestly, data is not the plural of anecdote, so I think the jury is still out.
That said, my standard process is to make a bootable copy of my setup with CCC or SD for an easy backtrack, (followed by a testrun of the backup), and then I just run the upgrade.
I’ve managed dozens of macs ever since OS6.5, and I don’t remember any major screwups.
I have a feeling that this Leopard update is smoother than the Tiger update. Its just that Tiger was a couple years ago and people have short memories. In any major upgrade, there are bound to be the 1 percent (or whatever the percentage may be, I’m sure it is tiny when compared to the PC side) of users that have a traumatic experience such as yours. Luckily, it hasn’t happened to me, at least not in recent memory… but being in the software biz for so long, I have seen my share and listened to lots of horror stories. Eventually, probability of a fatal error during upgrading catches up to us all, and this time, it caught you.
wow rob,
you are a dummy.
namaste
d
This is either a smear campaign against Apple on Ballmer’s payroll or the poster is a complete idiot. If you are too stupid to use Leopard which is the best OS, switch to Vista!
So, Dennis calls Rob a dummy…
then finishes his post with “NAMASTE”??!
We’ve a hypocrite in our midst.
I’m sorry to hear how painful this upgrade was for you Rob. I am amazed to hear you spent “100 hours” and are still not satisfied, as that is truly reminiscent of the Windows world I ran away from.
I’m just glad my team and I were able to help you get 1Password up and running quickly. At least you had one positive experience during this ordeal
Craig….. I agree… When you double-click the icon to install new Mac OS, the OS should automatically run a permissions repair BEFORE rebooting… upon reboot and selection of the drive, the installer should then automatically run Repair Disk. Once this is done, the installer should check for 3rd party daemons, extensions, etc. and ask if you wish to disable them (with a checklist to select individually or all) prior to install.
I believe something like this would resolve 95% of all install problems.
xkjq…. I’m a switcher and have had no problems at all upgrading two dozen machines…. PPC and Intel.
Sorry to add another comment so quickly… but I should also add that we only did upgrade installs… not archive installs.
You did an upgrade, didn’t you? Apple shouldn’t even offer that option. Do an Archive and Install preserving settings.
My Leopard install had far fewer problems.
That said, Firefox freezes my system from time to time - forcing me to reboot. I also had to fiddle around with my printer specs to print from Firefox. Mozilla suggested that 2.0.0.9 would fix everything but no such luck.
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have jumped on the Leopard bandwago so soon. I would have waited a few months until some of the more aggretious fixes had been applied.
Bad, Mac, bad.
41 comments in just over 5 hours. Blogging about Leopard is like sticking your head in a hornet’s nest.
Thomas - lots of folks report no problems and there are many suggestions here for maximizing your odds of a clean install. All in all, Leopard is a nice improvement over Tiger, so there’s that. (!)
Nick - fair point. Now that I’ve upgraded, I think it’s going on the shelf, but I’ll keep it in mind.
Nigel - rare indeed. Generally my experiences with OSX, as my blog sometimes notes, have been great. This was a big surprise.
Eliakim and David - I’m a huge fan of 1Password and I spread the word. It’s awesome. And the sync may be the best reason I have to get an iPhone. (!)
Jason - I’m sure they will. The early adopter in me is crying, though.
Everyone who had suggestions about how to install properly - many thanks. A lot of these ideas were on the sites I visited *after* I had problems. Sigh. But I’ll keep them in mind if I go down this road again. And my order is in for a second LaCie 500G drive so I can do disk cloning, as well as run Time Machine.
Michal - if I’d known at the outset that I was looking down the barrel of being a QA guinea pig I definitely would have waited. But as is generally the case, it always seems that the next step will be the step needed to fix the problem. C’est la vie.
Everyone who told me they’ve installed multiple machines without incident - I salute you. The Apple forums are full of people with similar issues, so I do think Apple has an issue here. No doubt they’ll sort through it as they always do.
Can people please stop spewing “repair permissions” as the solution to every Mac problem ever? It’s zapping the PRAM for OS X, and it just does as little. There is exactly zero chance that the install dvd not seeing the hard drive had anything at all to do with the permissions being wrong. If you don’t understand why this is, please stop giving advice until you do.
What was the fix for not seeing the hard drive?
P.S. I have yet to see a single Leopard upgrade problem and have upgraded about 15 machines so far.
Matt - there were two. One was to wait. For some people, an hour or so, for others, longer. Then the disk would appear. For others, that didn’t work, and another fix was to run disk utility off the DVD and - my memory is a little fuzzy here - either mount/unmount the disk or verify it. Can’t remember exactly. That seemed to prompt the disk and when I quit DU and went back to the installer it finally saw the disk.
Hi everyone,
First, I feel bad for Rob and his unhappy experiences. I regret that he’s had to go through this.
But here’s the question I must pose: Why do people take this experience and extrapolate beyond what happened to this user on this computer? Why do people say things like “Apple has released it’s first Microsoft-style upgrade?” What? (That’s a real comment from above.)
The truth is that such experiences are not a huge shock in a .0 release of any software by any company. I’ve seen such stories on every release of every operating system since I started doing tech work in ‘98. I’ve gone through every Mac upgrade starting with OS 7.5, including each iteration of OS X (even had the beta).
I maintain 110 Macs at a newspaper. So, of course, I don’t go running around upgrading OS’s on a willy-nilly basis. These are production machines, and I take great care. That being said, I almost never have these sorts of experiences with major Mac OS updates. For example, I’ve upgraded 5 machines to Leopard, trying different formulas (clean install, archive and install and upgrade install.) All 5 have gone without a hitch.
So, which one of us, dear reader - Rob or me - has had the more typical experience with Leopard? There’s no way that I will say it’s me, so how about we also say that it’s probably not Rob, either.
All I’m suggesting here is let’s be a little more careful with our rushes to judgment. Leopard is an excellent operating system with the usual assortment of “gotchas” when a huge code update is released into the wild.
If it took me 100 hours to install leopard, I would sure not post that fact to the Internet using my god given name. How embarrasing.
For non retarded people, do
Back up
Verify Back up
install (if install gives problems, then:)
format and clean install and migrate
If this takes you more then 5 hours, you should check your blood oxygen levels.
For what it is worth I think I know what happened to your keychain.
in earlier versions of OS X (10.2 and possibly 10.3) when a new account was created the default keychain was named .keychain. I think with 10.4 Apple changed this so new default keychains are all called “login.keychain”. If your default keychain is named in the earlier form then the first time you log in to your account after the Leopard upgrade some updating software runs that renames your keychain to “login.keychain”. *Unfortunately* it doesn’t set this as the default keychain (or didn’t for me) and when Safari etc. look for a password the Keychain system looks for a now non-existent keychain and reports an error. The fix is to use “Keychain Access” to set the renamed keychain as your default.
My upgrade (simple upgrade) was fairly smooth other than (a) being bitten by this keychain problem and (b) Spotlight refused to index my main hard drive until I deleted all trace of the old indices and manually started a reindex. (This was probably due to my having some Spotlight enhancing/modifying software installed that was incompatible with Leopard’s Spotlight.)
Thanks for your answer, Rob. If I may ask, what prompted you to upgrade to Leopard in the first place? I’ve been on the Mac since the 512Ke, and this is he only upgrade I have avoided, because of the vocal warnings audible everywhere. What is it in Leopard you need and did not have in Panther? What in Leopard makes your life simpler than it was in Panther land? Otherwise, what will it take for you to give up and revert to Panther until Leopard offers something worth hundreds of hours of effort to obtain?
Sounds like an unfortunate experience. I have upgraded both of my machines (a white MacBook and a Mac Pro) and have had, touch wood, no problems over the last week.
DK
First: the first guy’s comment was perfect.
Second: Let me put it in clearer terms: your issues are your fault for not doing all you could to fix this issue BEFORE installing.
Thirdly: I’m sorry you’ve had such a terrible experience. That having been said, you should be ashamed to put out an article that essentially garners attention because it is the first to attempt to seriously bash a product that on the whole is quite possibly the best OS release in computer history. Sure, Leopard has its shortcomings, all things do. Yours just happens to be blaming people for your problems. I just don’t get where you get off writing a nightmare piece. It just feels like fear-mongering/scare-tactics.
Fourthly: I’ve upgraded 4 machines in my house, one of which wasn’t Intel, and I haven’t had a single real issue. One of them even took 45 minutes exactly start to finish.
Fifthly: Love! Or as FSJ would say, NAMASTE.
Uh, Bob Barker, Son, hypocrite…
look up the meaning and get my gist, numb-skull…
Namaste to you Bob, till we meet in the ring where I run circle around you logically…
Er, is not “namaste” supposed to be a gesture of respect to another? A kind greeting??
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/namaste
Calling someone a dummy does not match with the definition of “namaste”.
And niether does “numb-skull”, you arrogant shit.
(please note that I did not finish this or any post with “namaste”)
Wow Bob,
You are quick.
Your mom called and said she wants her shoes back.
Oh and,
Namaste, may your inner light guide through the whelm of that which you consider your self to be a grandiose ASS in a community full of Butts.
It is times like these when those with the ability to criticize show whom they really are. Unhappy souls. Those whom never were able to find peace and joy in anything in life. Yet they are the first to cast a cruel jagged finger in ones direction to imply a sense of superiority, only to find that their diatribes of self dough drown out there rantings, thus making them look small and insignificant, dried up blow fish shit.
Namaste you dick
Re “namaste”, this entry has been linked by Fake Steve, so I would guess that is from one of his readers, and is of course ironic.
I had a few problems upgrading to Leopard, though nothing as extreme as you Rob. and I do adopt a belt and braces strategy for it. Run Disk Utility (or applejack), including repair permissions, then Disk Warrior, then backup with SuperDuper, then upgrade to Leopard, and finally repair permissions once more. I did discover in the course of all this that my old external iSight webcam when connected could cause I/O errors with my external disk connected to the other firewire port. However this was not solely a Leopard issue as it also happened under Tiger, and it is mentioned in the troubleshooting documentation of SuperDuper as a known issue.
Nuts. I did an archive and install of Leopard on my three home Macs: a G5 iMac, a G4 PowerBook and a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. All three installations took about 40-45 minutes. All of my principal applications survived, no problem. I had to reinstall a couple of printers and my scanner but Leopard found them all and they work.
Leopard broke my Parallels 3.0 application but I am quite confident that the problem is in Parallels, not 10.5.
I agree that the Panther-to-Tiger upgrade seemed easier than Tiger-to-Leopard. Nevertheless, 100 hours is a LONG TIME; difficult to imagine what weird and wonderful stuff you have on your machine.
For what it’s worth, a few months I also tried to “upgrade” a three year old ThinkPad to Vista — not only didn’t it work, there was no way to make it work — the hardware was instantly rendered obsolete by Microsoft. I know which experience I prefer…
Dear Rob,
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on how professional you are at replying to all these comments. It is very uncommon to see professionals such as yourself not loose their cool when being attacked by many less educated web-surfers. Myself just like many others had to redo their installation of Leopard from a normal “upgrade” to a full “clean install”. I was expecting a clean install since most OS “upgrades” are hardly ever successful. However, I thought It could be different with Leopard and I was wrong. I do have to say that with windows I have had worst horror stories than with any Mac I have ever owned or used both at work and at home. I am glad you sorted out your problems with Leopard. I did wanted to mention that you have a 90 day free technical support hotline from Apple ( Canada: 1-800-263-3394). You can call them and get them to help you fix any problems you may have with your transition from one OS to the other. They are usually very helpful answering your questions about the new OS, that’s all. Cheers!
Sorry to hear you had these problems, Rob. Let me also apologize for some of the knobs here who dump on your for the problems you have had, as I agree with you that Apple should have tested its installer a bit more before unleashing it (and I say that as a 17 year running certified fanboy). I installed Leopard on 2 computers on day 3 after release and had only one of the problems you describe, that with losing the keychain on both computers. I found a fix on the apple forums, though, which involved something like finding a keychain called login_renamed.keychain, and then renaming that back to login.keychain. This fixed it on both my computers. And there is little I do not like about leopard - I even like the transparent menu because my desktop switches every 30 minutes to some of my wife’s photography, and the menu bar changes along with them, allowing that big white strip to recede into the background.
Tis thou who cast the first stone in yonder lawyer’s direction, asshole.
I just found such two contrasting aspects of philosophy being tossed together as you did… well, weird.
[/conversation]
Backup.
That’s all. Just a bootable backup, and you’re all set.
I know it’s hard when you have the fever, and your hands are trembling with impatience to have your machine upgraded. Just be patient for the few extra minutes. Sure paid off for me this time.
I had one trouble-free upgrade, one (intentional) bare-metal reinstall, and one upgrade that was a bit wonky (though usable) at the outse that turned into a bare-metal. I’d have lost my iPhoto library (through carelessness on my part) if I hadn’t had a full, fresh, bootable backup.
Despite the hundreds of people crying foul about the Leopard upgrade, don’t forget the silent majority of MILLIONS of users who have upgraded with absolutely no problems whatsoever.
I had a similar problem with the ‘Archive and Install’ option, but because I actually took the time to read and understand what this meant, I was able to quickly recover my old files which are safely deposited in a folder called ‘Old System’ at the root of your hard drive.
Andy - Like I said, I used Archive & Install, but it failed. As a result, the old system wasn’t in the “Previous Systems” folder. it was buried deep in a hidden folder. You perhaps didn’t, um, take the time to read and understand what my original post meant. As far as the “millions” are concerned, not sure what you mean - no one is forgetting anyone. I’m simply writing about what happened to me. But even just a quick read of Apple’s own forums shows that there are many others out there who had problems, some serious, with this upgrade.
Rob - thanks for the tip - where were you when I needed you? Just kidding.
dbsmith - no weird and wonderful stuff. Parellels, but that was easy to recover. Just the cumulative time of having, researching and then fixing successive problems with the install.
nikkunikku - thanks for dropping by. Glad to find out my Leopard problems are my fault, particularly since I did everything exactly by the book, and experienced problems that in most cases have been experienced by many other people, and in response to which Apple has in at least one case publicly acknowledged Leopard has a problem. Oh, and the patch Apple is rushing to market even as we speak - I guess that’s my fault too. Second - “you should be ashamed to put out an article that essentially garners attention because it is the first to attempt to seriously bash a product that on the whole is quite possibly the best OS release in computer history.” You really just have got to be kidding me. By all means, let’s not let the facts get in the way of Leopard love.
Michal - Leopard is running smoothly now except for the (apparent) problem with USB drives, so I see no reason to switch back. (The iTunes issue is also troubling, but when the new LaCie arrives I’m going to move all music over to it so I’m hoping that will fix that problem.) The two main features I switched for were, ironically enough, Time Machine, and Data Detectors in Mail. And I like both a lot. Oh, and I really like the look of the new Front Row, too.
As I said, 100 hours is a long time. Your claim that it took “several hours” to run the archive and install, coupled with your claim to have spent “about 100 hours of time spent trying to fix things so far” makes me think that you are either (a) embellishing (in the extreme) to generate web traffic or (b) somewhat Macintosh inept. Something is fundamentally wrong here and I will bet it’s not with Leopard. Yes, the discussion forums indicate that some people have had issues — some people ALWAYS have issues. Yes, my personal experience is that earlier Mac O/S upgrades have, perhaps, been smoother. But Leopard isn’t the unmitigated disaster you want your readers to believe. As for the 100 hours — you are either fibbing, or you have no idea what you’re doing. I suppose either is possible.
I installed Leopard on two machines. The first, went fine; but I had some issues with my iTunes like you… but I attributed this to changing the drives where the music was stored and creating a new fresh user account.
On my second machine, it failed to install (drive did not show up). It seemed deeply damaged. After some fixing with Disk Warrior, I was finally able to install Leopard. This was a upgrade install, and it has been working great since the initial hiccup.
There can only have been some underlying problems with your disk or file structure or–
I can truthfully say that I unhooked all peripherals, repaired the disk with DiskWarrior, etc., and then did a straight “Upgrade” encouraged by a tech guru, and it worked nigh-perfectly after half an hour. I’ve heard of some cases where people experienced the opposite, but I don’t know anyone personally who had this sort of problem. I think that you should keep a complete, bootable backup drive just in case, and if your first attempt at an upgrade runs into trouble, you do yourself no benefit by trying to jerryrig the file system by making all files visible, etc. If the Archive & Install doesn’t work, the alternative is to “Erase and Install” and then Migrate your applications and settings via the Migration tool from the cloned backup drive you keep. You do keep one of those handy, don’t you?
Jim - what app do you prefer for disk cloning? It seems to me that the right backup strategy is to keep a) Time Machine backups, b) a current bootable clone and c) an offsite copy (I like Mozy) of docs. What do you do?
“if your first attempt at an upgrade runs into trouble, you do yourself no benefit by trying to jerryrig the file system by making all files visible, etc. If the Archive & Install doesn’t work, the alternative is to “Erase and Install” and then Migrate your applications and settings via the Migration tool from the cloned backup drive you keep”
Exactly right! If you’re in there rummaging around for 100 hours to make it work, you’re just setting yourself up for the same experience when 10.6 comes along!
Hi Rob,
sorry to read about your troubles. I usually refrain from early adopting any kind of software. The same thing with Tiger. I stuck with 10.3. until about half a year after Tigers rerlease date. This time I broke with tradition and preordered and installed Leopard on my Mac Book Pro 2.4, after cloning the HD to a external drive, I might add. I expected to resolve the droping W-LAN connection issues I was experiencing with 10.4.10. I was lazy, so I choose to update Tiger instead of a clean install. In the end all went well, I am didn’t experience any problems while installing, nor while running the machine since then. Later on I installed another copy on an iMac with no problems at all. I know, this no help or relief for you, just my 2 cents, but I wished to inform that it can turn out differently. Still, I believe Apple needs to put more efforts in product quality.
Blogging about Leopard is like sticking your head in a hornet’s nest.
It is well documented that Mac fans are the internet’s creationists.
My Leopard experience has been a nightmare as well. One particularly vexing problem I have encountered is an inability to use USB devices (such as the MetaGeek Spectrum analyzer) that ran fine under Tiger. The ssh client no longer interoperates with the ssh server on SuSE Linux 10.2.
Also I am encountering very strange data corruption bugs with USB hard drives. When I copy fils over from the drive and do a diff, they are differences that seem unexplainable (e.g. letters added to words, etc.).
Also, it seems that there is an explosion of badware targeted at MACs. Aside from the codec attack, I am seeing Firefox spontaneously going to new websites, possibly in response to badware advertisements.
Configuring the Leopard firewall is baffling, since it is not clear whether “block incoming connections” actually does that, or what the “application” firewall actually does, if anything.
Overall, this is a terrifying upgrade. I probably shouldn’t have done the upgrade at all, given that my Powerbook G4 was working fine with Tiger, but now my machine is virtually useless, and I’m facing hours of work to downgrade to Tiger.
At this point, Windows Vista is looking very good. With SP1 beta, it is running like a champ. The application compatibility is *far* better than Leopard.
I know the Apple engineers have been really stretched having to do Apple TV, iPhone and now Leopard all within a year. But Leopard is so far from being ready that I would barely qualify it as meeting the bar for a Beta 2.
“The two main features I switched for were, ironically enough, Time Machine, and Data Detectors in Mail. And I like both a lot. Oh, and I really like the look of the new Front Row, too.” — Rob Hyndman
Thanks again for answering, Rob, and glad I asked: sounds like zero reason for me to upgrade… Since I’m in the habit of backing up via SuperDuper! before bed each night, I’m not dying for Time Machine. I no longer use Mail because I prefer to forward all my mail to Gmail, so it’s always backed up and reachable, no matter where I am or whose machine I am on. And I have never used Front Row.
So, seems Leopard will creep into my life with the next Mac I buy, hopefully years from now.
Best!
“The two main features I switched for were, ironically enough, Time Machine, and Data Detectors in Mail. And I like both a lot. Oh, and I really like the look of the new Front Row, too.” — Rob Hyndman
Thanks again for answering, Rob, and glad I asked: sounds like zero reason for me to upgrade… Since I’m in the habit of backing up via SuperDuper! before bed each night, I’m not dying for Time Machine. I no longer use Mail because I prefer to forward all my mail to Gmail, so it’s always backed up and reachable, no matter where I am or whose machine I am on. And I have never used Front Row.
So, seems Leopard will creep into my life with the next Mac I buy, hopefully years from now.
Best!
I’m divided. On the one hand, I want to help support the correct (I hope) impression that most of the time these things go really well, and that it is only people who (unfortunately for them) have problems who blog it or post to the forums. On the other hand, there are some valid points brought up here.
I have read some media comments referring to the Apple Discussion Forums to support that Leopard is a bad OS upgrade. This is absurd. The Apple forums are for people with problems, so if you look there — in any area — you will find only problems. Quite biased evidence.
I installed using some of the precautions advised, making a backup with SuperDuper and upgrading all software, checking disk permissions and repairing disks, etc. Because I read a good article in MacWorld about it. But then, I’m pretty savvy, if I do say so myself, and I doubt my mom would do these things.
That said, I did a standard upgrade and got the famed “bluescreen” due to my old Logitech software. (Damn that it was the only thing I didn’t upgrade prior to installing because it didn’t have an easy upgrade button…). So held my breath and did a clean install, using Migration Assistant to transfer everything from the backup to my HD. This worked perfectly, and I have only had good experiences with Leopard since. There are a lot of serious productivity improvements, like Quick Look and Spaces.
I want to conclude by proposing that this should be the upgrade for the rest of us, and that users like my mom should not have to know about reparing permissions or anything else of that sort. The installer should indeed do necessary checks and repairs beforehand. I think an extra 30 minutes in the installer doesn’t matter since it takes so long anyway.
buddy, you deserve a typewriter for being such a retard. along many here who added likewise zero computer knowledge.
Ouch!
I didn’t have any of your problems, and my Leopard install is from one of the pre-release seeds. This sounds really nasty, with a lot of cascading f-ups from the initial bad install
Out of curiousity, where did the hidden archive of your system directory end up?
PS sorry you have had so many fanboys getting upset that you had a bad time