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.
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 :) 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.
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”??!
:o
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?
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