Crazy with love, that should be! We need to get that clear from the beginning. I’ve only been using Leopard for a few days, and I wonder what all the bitching was about. But first, how we got here.
Situation: original MacBook, no frills (no SuperDrive), 2 gigs of RAM, set up with Tiger on original 60 GB hard drive.
First, I backed up the original drive with SuperDuper on an external FireWire drive. Then I replaced the original 60 GB drive with a 160 GB, 7200 rpm Hitachi drive. New situation: MacBook has brand-new hard drive, no OS, oops. How do I get Leopard onto the new drive?
1. Hit power button, hear chime.
2. Shove in Leopard DVD, installer starts up.
3. Install Leopard, no migration of files, apps, or settings.
Well, that was fun! Then I started manually moving a few things over from the cloned copy of the previous drive. Not fun! In several stages, I fired up Migration Assistant and moved apps, documents, and library. And then the doubt set in…
I had so many apps that needed registering again, I thought something might have gone wrong. I was also left a little bothered by the somewhat slap-dash nature of my installation procedure, and so decided to re-insert the Leopard DVD and do an erase and install. Why get into Leopard unless the installation is done correctly in the first place? The only trouble was, the DVD didn’t work.
Remember, it worked perfectly the very first time when I stuck it into a machine with a blank hard drive! The second time, however, the install DVD just wouldn’t ever get through to the actual installation process. Once during the initial DVD check, it went all the way to 95% complete before failing and telling me for the umpteenth time to clean the DVD and try again.
I spent an entire day and most of a night with this. In the process, and after multiple DVD wipings and incantations — I won’t tell you which techniques I used, because I want to maintain a shred of dignity in the end — the Leopard disk was pretty scratched up. At this point I decided that either the disk was faulty or I’d ruined it, so the next day I drove to the Apple Store in Albuquerque (about 250 miles round-trip at 16 mpg) and shelled out retail for a SECOND Leopard DVD…
Talk about obsessing: I had an apparently successful Leopard installation and wanted to get it exactly right (or so I thought), so I paid double for Leopard. Well, last night I tried to do an “Erase and install” on the MacBook with the new install DVD. SAME PROBLEM!! Either the MacBook spit out the DVD, or the installer wouldn’t ever get to the point of actually installing. Aaaghh!
Perhaps there’s a problem with the CD/DVD-ROM drive. I don’t know. But by midnight last night, I finally grew up:
1. The original Leopard installation on the new internal MacBook hard drive stays! After all, if the install DVD is acting up for whatever reason, how could I trust that an Erase and Install would work once the drive was erased? I might end up with NO Leopard installation, just a weekend before Macworld, when I need to be up and blogging.
2. The second Leopard DVD is stil pristine and I’ll hang onto it. Any DVD drive cleaning issues will be addressed later, and I won’t worry about my “impure” Leopard installation unless something goes wrong. In the meantime, I’m moving on.
So that’s all for now. I’ll follow up later with a second report. The main thing here was that I love Leopard so much, I just didn’t want to continue fussing with my Immaculate Installation Procedure.
Leopard rocks. More soon!
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