BurnsFamily Blog

What I did to ensure the cleanest possible upgrade experience:

1. Backup my data!
   • I found a sweet deal on a portable USB-powered hard drive. It attaches to the laptop with a single
     USB “Y” cable — no power cord to mess with, trip over, or forget! On my PowerBook G4 I had to attach both ends of the “Y” cable to my laptop to give the drive enough power, but on the Mac Book Pro the drive only needed a single end of the “Y” cable. Nice. $99 at Fry’s for the Maxtor OneTouch III 160GB drive that’s about the size of a stack of 3×5 index cards. Sweet.
   • I used “SuperDuper!” to backup the laptop’s hard drive before I did anything. This version wasn’t compatible with Leopard yet, but that didn’t matter — I needed a backup of my Tiger disk. This took about 3 hours to complete.
2. Ensure that I didn’t have the APE installed. I was pretty sure I never loaded it, but I didn’t want a Blue Screen of Leopard Death. A friend at Apple pointed me to this new Technical Note.
3. Run “Fix Permissions” and “Repair Disk” after I booted into the Leopard installer disk, but before I started the actual install.
4. After the Leopard installation completed, complete the registration process without delay.
   • I had a problem on a previous install where I let the registration window linger for a few hours while I went to dinner. This was a Bad Idea because the Software Update had kicked in and downloaded the 10.5.1 updater. During Registration, it popped up ON TOP of the registration window and I started that process. This caused the machine to get stuck in a loop of logging me out as soon as I logged back in. I had to power cycle the machine to break it out of this loop. Lesson learned for my 2nd installer.
5. Run the Software Update as soon as you login to make sure you pick up all the latest Leopard goodness.

A few things that didn’t go as smoothly as they could have:

- I’m testing FireFox 3 (codenamed “Minefield” and had that set as my default browser. Leopard changed that to be FireFox instead.

- Apple Mail junk mail settings weren’t enabled at all. (All other settings, including rules, came across fine.) This made my first connection to my ISP mail server a little painful: email marked as spam by my ISP was flooding in.

- Adium lost all my settings and preferences. Thankfully my AIM buddy list is stored on the AOL server so I didn’t lose any group or buddy list entries.

- iSync found 22 sync conflicts between Entourage and iCal/Address Book

- running diskutility “verify disk” halted the machine for over 5 minutes while it checked the disk. When I say “halted” I mean that the menu bar clock stopped ticking and applications were mostly unresponsive. While DU was running I couldn’t read/compose email and I couldn’t surf the Web. Hung. Surprisingly, DU reported an error on the disk which is very odd because I manually repaired and re-checked the disk while booting from the Leo install DVD. Why would the extents get corrupt after the Leopard upgrade, Software Update, and subsequent clean restarts?

- I had to re-add all of my printers. None of my “saved printers” were intact, but oddly enough all of my “printer saved settings” DID get saved. Things like “greyscale” and “2-up” were intact. Weird.

Things that worked smoothly:

• Pretty much everything else. Nicely done, Apple.
• So far I’ve upgraded two Mac Book Pros and a PowerBook G4 without too much problem.