Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Leopard tamed!
My previous experiences with upgrading Mac OS X have always been positive: insert CD (or DVD), restart, click upgrade, watch TV, done. This time of upgrading to Leopard, however, proved to a challenge.The Leopard DVD comes as a dual-layer format, and that seems to cause confusion to my MacBook. The first time I inserted it, the MacBook spitted it back out. A fluke, I'd thought. Tried again, heard some unusual disc spinning noises, but eventually it read the DVD. Clicked install and restart, went through the early installation steps (picked a language, install destination, etc.), then as the process went half-way, the dreaded "Installation Failed" warning popped up. I tried a couple more times, even choosing the risky "Erase and Install" option, but that didn't help. Instead I ended up with an erased drive and no operating system. Not good.
Thankfully we have another Mac at home, and I was finally able to install Leopard on my MacBook by starting it in Target Disk mode connected to the other Mac. Now I've spent hours trying to set it up with various missing applications and such. I'm finally at a point where I can productively use the laptop again.
I was glad that I'd done a backup just last week and was able to retrieve some needed documents. Also found my Parallels virtual machine image of Windows XP and restored it. Hint: Backup just stores the data as a DMG file which you can mount and browse.
Also FYI, my DVD drive specs are:
MATSHITA CD-RW CW-8221:
Firmware Revision: GA0H
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw
Media: Insert media and refresh to show available burn speeds
Labels: Apple, DVD, install, leopard, Target Mode
posted by eugene at 3:37 AM
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