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Neil is currently offline  Neil
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SHELLY PALMER REPORT:
The Leopard Chronicles: Mac Hell Unleashed
November 2 2007 5:36 AM PDT

By Shelly Palmer



One of my seriously Mac-addicted staff members stood in the rain last Friday
night to get us a five-pack of the Apple's new Leopard operating system.
Being only slightly less addicted, I set aside 40 minutes circa 8:30am Saturday
morning to do the install. I stopped for the day about 11:30pm -- this is
my story.

08:30am --The Process -- Before attempting my Leopard install, I made a disk
image (.dmg) file of my entire hard drive and placed it on my MacPro Quad
Core. This took about an hour. I had a versioned back up of my drive on a
different external drive and I had all of my non-application files backed
up online, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that if something went wrong,
I'd be covered. As it turns out, this was prescient.

09:30am -- The Leopard Install -- I put the Leopard installation disk in
the drive and clicked the installation icon. After about five minutes I saw
an error message. For some reason, my internal hard drive was partitioned
using the "Apple Partition" scheme. This is usually used for PowerPC-based
Macs. My computer is an Intel-based Mac and, to be honest, I have no idea
how this occurred. However, the error message was clear, you must ERASE your
hard drive and partition it using the GUID partition scheme if you want to
install Leopard.

Erase my hard drive?

09:45am -- The First Customer Service Call -- To be fair, this was the first
day of the software release, so one could reasonably assume that the wait
time for tech support would be long. After being on hold for 48 minutes,
I spoke to a lovely woman with a very thick foreign accent. I asked her if
the error message was correct or if there was any other way to install Leopard.
"No," she said. "You will have to erase and partition your drive using disk
utility. But here's the good news ... just copy your disk image onto the
newly partitioned drive, shift-double-click the mounted image and next time
you reboot your computer it will wake up exactly like your pre-Leopard build."

Wow, that's going to be easy. I have the disk image, I have a back up incase
it fails, I have the whole disk and all the files in several places. OK,
let's go for it.

11:00am -- Partition Trauma -- you know what? It's really hard to erase a
perfectly healthy computer even if you think you're going to make it better.
What a painful thing to have to do. But, after a short prayer to the computer
gods, I erased and GUID partitioned the drive. The process was very fast
-- sort of like ripping a band-aid off a cut. It only hurt for a second.

11:15am -- The Leopard Install Redux -- just as promised, about 40 minutes
later, OS X 10.5 Leopard was installed on my computer. Visually, it is slightly
different from OS X 10.4 Tiger. My first impression was that the newly translucent
top menu bar was going to bother me forever. It probably will.

01:00pm -- The Fun Begins -- It took an hour to copy the .dmg file to my
empty Leopard computer. I mounted the disk image and then shift-double-clicked
it. The image dramatically increased in size then faded away. In its place
was an open directory that looked exactly like my old Macintosh HD directory.
Perfect. A quick reboot and I'll be done.


------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------
Check out the Shelly Palmer Report archive.
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------

01:04pm -- WTF? You know you would not be reading this article if this trick
worked. It didn't. You also know that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I tried
the shift-double-click trick about four more times while I dialed Apple tech
support to try to get into the queue.

02:14pm -- Apple Tech Support, an Oxymoron -- If my first tech support person
had a thick foreign accent, I don't even know how to describe the language
this gentleman spoke. After I described my problem to him he said, "I am
not qualified to help you, you must talk to Level 2 tech support. Can I put
you in their queue? The wait time will be about 15 minutes." The line magically
disconnected after 30 minutes forcing me to call back and go through the
process again.

The songs they play on hold at Apple Tech support are not for everybody.
I'm being overly polite.

04:32pm -- Level 2 Tech Support -- I have a new best friend at Apple, her
name is Dawn. English is absolutely her first language and she could not
have been nicer on the phone. There was only one problem. She had no idea
why Leopard would not permanently mount this disk image. In fact, she told
me a story about her Friday evening Leopard experience. Truthfully, I'm surprised
she was able to function at work on Saturday. Just a few tidbits of Apple
knowledge from our call ...

Yes, I found a bug. Engineering would take five to seven days to get back
to me with a workaround or solution. She copied every file from her old hard
drive to her Leopard hard drive by hand (one at a time). She didn't know
if my suggested work around would work because Leopard was "too new." The
five different things we tried together (that she thought would work) all
failed. No, there is no published list of files you can manually copy from
Tiger to Leopard with any reasonable expectation of success. If my proposed
solution didn't work I could wait for Apple Engineering to fix the bug or
try to reinstall my old operating system. Ugh!

She gave me her name, email and a direct dial phone number at Apple and told
me to contact her anytime. I appreciated the concern, but I still didn't
have a working computer.

06:12pm -- My Work-around -- This is not my first rodeo and I am not a computer
novice. The workaround was obvious to me, but what a huge pain in the butt.
Here it is in shorthand for the techno-geeks who care.

1) copy the disk image to an external drive (1 hour).

2) mount the drive and launch the Apple migration assistant. (4 hours)

3) rename your admin account and short name appropriately (or you'll be forced
to edit every program that stores data in your user account).

4) set the startup for your new account so that you don't have to ever see
the phantom account you were forced to setup.

5) get ready to reinstall a bunch of programs and re-enter 60% of your serial
numbers.

11:30pm -- Almost done -- Leopard is running on my computer. Almost every
program came back to life. I probably spent two-three more hours over the
next few days tweaking and re-installing stuff to get the computer working
more or less like it did before the upgrade. And, sadly, I am seriously considering
wiping the drive again, reinstalling Leopard and reinstalling my programs
from scratch. There's something not quite right about this install.

Epilog -- Was it worth it? No. Should you attempt an upgrade to Leopard?
If you don't have to erase your drive, you won't have this experience. The
300 new features that Apple lists on their site are all incremental improvements
over Tiger. Safari is still slow, spotlight is better, cover flow, as a way
to view a folder, is wonderful and it's far more useful than I ever imagined
it would be. And, on this computer, Time Machine (Apple's "set it and forget
it" backup software) does not work.

Post Script -- For those of you who are wondering, my personal computer is
a 17" MacBook Pro with an Intel 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM. It has
a 200 GB, 7200 rpm aftermarket hard drive. It was running the latest, most
up-to-date versions of Tiger.

Here's a list of what you can look forward to if you need to erase your drive
to install Leopard. It may also happen if you simply use the migration assistant.

Firefox can't download because it doesn't think it's allowed to (none of
the obvious fixes seem to help)
Final Cut Studio needed a serial number
Logic Studio needed a serial number
Adobe CS2 needed serial numbers for every program
Adobe Studio (all the Macromedia programs, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks,
etc,) needed to be reinstalled
Notebook (from circusponies) needed a serial number
Videocue (from varasoft) no problem
Transmit (ftp client) no problem
iPhoto - find the new directory and point to it
iTunes - lost an install, if I had been maxed, I would have had to call Apple
and get another login or something. I would really like to have my machine
authorization back, because I have another machine that I had to deauthorize
to authorize this one
Parallels - astoundingly no problem
Flip4mac - no problem
WireTap Studio - needed serial number
Prompt (teleprompter software) no problem
iWork '08 no problem
All printer drivers - gone -- all needed to be reinstalled
Microsoft Office 2004 - quirky, but after opened a few times, seemed to calm
down and work
Quicksliver - no problem
Skype - no problem
On2 Flix Pro -- complete reinstall
Elgato Turbo264 - no problem


Shelly Palmer is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and
the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked
TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy
of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted
Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts
& Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas
of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced
Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the
science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly's blog here.
Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net
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