Leopard - let out of the cage too soon?
Installing Apple’s new operating system, 10.5.0 or Leopard, should be a painless experience. “Should,” being the operative word. It seems that Apple have managed to bend time with their new application, “Time Machine,” because the phrase, “Less than one minute remaining,” lasts a damn sight longer than a minute.
Let me be the first to put my hand up and say, “OK, I should have backed up first.” In my defense, I have used Apple computers for years, have upgraded successfully all the way from 9.1 through to Tiger and NEVER had a problem.
The Leopard install did not go well. The first obstacle I came across was, on inserting the disc, there was only one option available to me: “Erase and Install.” No, I do not want to erase ALL the information on my computer. Why on earth would I want to do that? OK, no problem, I will back out of the installer, save the information I need to keep and start again. Right?
Wrong. Hit the restart button, pick the disc I want to start from (my original hard drive)- Nothing – Just Apple’s version of the blue screen of death. Hmmmmm, that can’t be right, OK, I’ll just restart.
No go. The computer starts to boot up, then dies. OK, no problem, I’ll start in safe mode. No I won’t – same thing, dies on startup. OK I’ll try starting up with the c button held down. Great, it started. Not great, my only option is to erase the disc and install from scratch again. I do not want to do that. Not only that, but the disc utility is telling me that the hard drive cannot be un-mounted, so I can’t do any repair work on it.
OK, no problem, I’ll take the disc out and try again. Reboot with the track pad button held down. Nope. OH SHIT, I’m starting to get worried now. It won’t reboot in any mode, I can’t get the disc out and I’m miles from the nearest Apple store, I am in France and seriously doubt my ability to explain to the bored technician what the problem is in French. I see myself lamely pointing at my MacBook Pro, shrugging helplessly and offering a large pile of money saying, “S’il vous plait.” It is now one ‘o’ clock in the morning and Mark is not a happy bunny.
I’m getting desperate by this time. I have already wasted a good three hours when I should have been working. So, I decide to look at my options. They seem slim. I can’t restart, I can’t get the disc out and I do not want to erase all my data.
Aha, I say to myself, I can install Leopard on my external hard drive, recover the data from my MacBook Pro’s hard drive, erase the disc, install Leopard on the MacBook and migrate the data back. A solution. After four more hours looking at this screen the problem was finally solved.
If you are thinking of upgrading to leopard in the near future, unless you own a real time machine, I suggest doing it this way until Apple get their act together. In my next post I will take a look at the more positive aspects of Apple’s new OS. Leopard. In the meantime, here’s a quick look at my new desktop. Thank God for the migration Assistant. In the meantime, Mr. Apple, you owe me 7 hours work. You know where to send the check.
Emad | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
I can’t believe this… I upgrade my leopard very easily. I simply inserted the disc, clicked button and 2 or 3 hours later, I was done… WOW!!! Sorry man, but at least you didn’t lose all your data
Mark Knowles | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Believe it. I am not the only one to have had this issue either. I was surprised to say the least. Thank goodness for the migration assistant and my foresight (luck) in having an external drive available.
Jovan | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Wow. Sorry to hear about that. Glad you are up and running now!
freighterman | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Upgrade went fine for me…took 45 minutes, start to finish.
Only problem is most HP printers/scanners don’t work till they roll out new drivers.
So, if I really need to scan something I just reboot to Tiger on my external HD.
I find Leopard runs much faster on my iMac and TM works as advertised.
Mark Knowles | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
I am having the same problem with my Lexmark. I had problem upgrading. I can’t use my printer. You have had to keep a copy of Tiger on your external drive because your printer/scanner won’t work. Seems to me, I got the title of this post about right
Jason V | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
I have upgraded Leopard on three machines. A PowerBook G4, MacBook Pro and A Dual G5 haven’t had a single problem. They all did the upgrade in less than an hour each. A friend of mine however had a real problem with it. He didn’t loose all of his files. He was told that the problem stemmed from some third party software that he had on his computer. It seems that this might actually be the source for most of the problems. As far as printers are concerned I did have to reinstall my printer but it was a very easy process and it seems to be working just fine on all of my computers.
Marc B | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
It installed just fine on a new 20″ iMac in under an hour. I did a “Repair Permissions” and complete backup before the install and I also disconnected all my peripherals.
No problems and my old HP Deskjet worked just fine right away. “Spaces” has been a great workflow facilitator. Coverflow is awesome with the Quickview, particularly for finding and proofing my web site pages before uploading them. The new iChat features are just fun. I am living La Vida Leopard.
Did you repair permissions? Have you done an HD verification recently? What did you have hooked up to your machine while installing? Did you have any hack software installed? You are a little sparce on details here so it is difficult to judge what might bite others from what you provided.
Mark Knowles | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
Nothing hooked up to the laptop other than a mouse and a Sony monitor. No hacked software installed, HD verification done recently. This is a less than 6 month old MacBook Pro with just a basic install of Tiger. I have not been able to find a reason for running into this problem and have had no issues with Leopard other than the ones I will list in an upcoming post. I love Spaces, and Quickview is awesome. How on earth did you manage to do a repair permission, a complete backup and afull install in less than an hour? you can be my new mac guru. And with the new screen sharing feature, you can show me how to do it.
Stephen S | Nov 7, 2007 | Reply
I, too, have upgraded 3 machines: Mini G4, Mini Intel, and Powerbook G4 (waiting on the Intel macbook pro)and had no problems. The upgrade seemed to be a little slow and my Powerbook kernel panic’d on the post install reboot but after a shutdown and restart it has been fine and run smoothly if not slightly perkier than on Tiger. I will agree, pre-upgrade backups are a must though.
Trygve Roos | Nov 19, 2007 | Reply
If productivity is important to you, don’t downgrade to Leopard! I is a disaster - printers do not work on my MacBook Pro, and my G4 just died - not even a blue screen - but a black. It took me 6 hours to find a workaround. Leopard is probably a more dangerous threat to productivity than any virus or trojan horse. It is a mediocre, premature piece of s—-ware. Watch out, wait for a year or so, or try a PC (I’ll do it tomorrow). In addition, Apple spoiled Soundtrack Pro, now it cannot open its own files, and the ‘Frequency Spectrum View’ is now useless, smothered with squalid colors. Apple - hear this - give us back a reliable OS and a better, not worse Soundtrack Pro, or just rename it ‘Some kind of a soundtrack software for adventurous amateurs’
HeavyGod | Nov 27, 2007 | Reply
Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!
Karen Grant | Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
I am experiencing several LEOPARD probs. One is installing photoshop: very difficult. With TIGER I could access my scanner from Adobe; now I have to go to my scanner first, then save the image and then import it to ph.shop for adjustments. Too cumbersome. Anyone have better ideas?
2nd prob is in aol: when I read my mail and try to make the window bigger (ie dragging on the lower left hand corner), the window itself does get larger but the text portion remains the same size. So I’ll wind up with a larger but blank screen but the text (or image) part does not budge. Has anyone had that problem & was able to solve??? Any suggestions?