The day began beautifully. Besides being quite sick with the flu, I was home in bed, trusty 2.2Ghz Macbook Pro with 4GB Ram and a fancy Leopard disc. All was well with the world.
I stuck in this magical disk, dreaming of spaces, stacks and time machines. I sat through over an hour of the most boring install screen ever…I know, simplicity and all but damn, give me something, a feature slideshow? Drying paint? Growing Grass? Geeeze. Anyways, back to the story….
An hour or so later, it was ready to reboot. I said yes and let it go, it spit out the Leopard disc and a few minutes later…drumroll……..nothing.
I had a, yes…get ready….blue screen of death. Of course it was a Mac so it had to be fancier. It was a blue background with a usable black cursor that did nothing. There was no hard disk activity or any signs of life besides the cursor mocking me. I rebooted it verbose and it ran through a mile of text before smashing me headfirst into the same blue screen.
I rebooted and tried to shift to safe mode, nothing. I held down command-s to enter single user mode and that worked, I tried to repair the disk, repair permissions, nothing worked. I installed again with the exact same results. I exhausted all of Apple’s tech support options with no luck.
Finally I decided to just do the archive and install mode to get a clean install and finally my Leopard roared to life. It was of course missing all of my software so I spent the next few hours installing applications just to be safe. I moved my parallels images, music, photos, documents and stuff over, of course I had to go into unix and display hidden files to even be able to see them as they existed under another profile. It really was a total nightmare. I started around 3pm and I quit with a 95% back to normal computer around midnight.
After surfing the forums I found this to be a quite common occurance amont Leopard installers. How could something this big be missed?
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Tags: Mac, Apple, Leopard, OS X, Macbook
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went without a hitch for me on several machines. I did 3 clean installs and 5+ upgrades so far…
The only trouble i had was with my own Macbook pro, clean install that some parts of my manual backup didn’t restore well, ical and such… i guess the structure has changed.
I too experienced a NIGHTMARE installing Leopard!
I went to my Mac store yesterday evening and stood in line with the throngs of sheep waiting for my Koolaid. I came home and installed it first on my new iMac (about 6 months old). The upgrade went smoothly. It was a slow and boring 2 hour process, but all went fine.
Next I went to install the (upgrade?) on my new MacBook (about 8 months old). The second install was next to impossible! The screen went completely screwy! The screen started scrolling sideways whenever I would move the mouse. The display size of the screen went huge and part of the dialog was off the screen. So how would I be able to install the software? No mouse control! And no way to even see the entire screen! And no way to recover my laptop with a restart either!
I eventually figured out how to TAB through the dialogs on the screen to parts of the screen that I could not see, and confirm answer to set up questions that I could not read by pressing the space bar. Eventually I managed to mash the right sequence of invisible options and the software was finally installed.
Hold the phone. The curse was not broken yet. Parallels would not work on either of my computers. I had to uninstall Parallels on both machines and reinstall Parallels on both machines before it would work. Finally after a long and very unpleasant experience, both computers seem to be working as they should.
As a Windows user since version 3.0 I have performed my share of system upgrades, This upgrade was the worst computer upgrade I have ever seen! Thanks Mac!
Did you have Clear Dock installed?
http://www.silvermac.com/2007/leopard-installation-problems-blue-screen/
Unsanity’s “Application Enhancer” also appears to be causing ABSODs. If you don’t have 2.0.3 installed, panic!
Oh Jesus H. Christ! Are you kidding me? You had a DAY of HELL installing Leopard? Box up your computer and send it back to Apple, ’cause you’re too stupid to own a computer.
My install of Leopard took 20 minutes tops, on a system nearly the same as yours.
You had to endure a boring screen for an hour. Oh the horror, how did you ever survive?
[...] http://www.philoking.com/2007/10/26/my-day-of-hell-installing-os-x-leopard/ [...]
HEY, Maybe you people should stay with windows XP. With all its bugs
at least it’s predictable and it works. ——Doug