Datapoint

[prog]

For some reason - mainly coz I wanted to see Time Machine work with my new hard drive - I upgraded my ancient (~2003) desktop to Leopard. I thought it would be as easy a process as the similar upgrade I put my laptop through last month.

Instead, I am experiencing the failiest OS upgrade I've seen in my 17 years of Mac using. I can't log into my old account, except via ssh; otherwise I'm left staring at a blank screen and a beachball. I can log into other accounts, if I force-quit the Finder once. The new disk was recognized the first time I started up, and now it gets the "You have inserted a crap disk. Initialize?" dialog. (Whose buttons are unresponsive, and which goes away by itself after a minute. Except when it doesn't.)

Installed an OS update through Amy's account, unless I didn't. It was a process full of ambiguous error messages and odd application behavior. I am too tired and cranky to see if it worked, tonight. Tomorrow, maybe.

The next thing I'll try is starting up with everything unplugged, then running Disk Utility, and then after that I guess I'll have to create a new jmac2 user and sidestep into it, or something.

Bah.

Comments

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Do/did you per chance have Unsanity's APE installed on that machine? Because that is known to cause blue-screen-with-spinning-beachball issues after upgrading to Leopard. And apparently some Logitech mouse drivers install it behind the scenes.

I'm too lazy to dig up relevant links right now, but this was all over the Mac blogosphere a couple of months ago.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'll look around if I'm still stuck... I'm not out of my standard bag of diagnostic tricks yet. It's too bad I gotta reach into it so far, though.

Am now updating to 5.1 for reals. It was apparently just faking it last night! I think I was out of disk space and it was having trouble articulating this problem. Moved my iTunes folder to my secondary disk and tried again. Grind grind grind.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

At some point, it makes sense to copy all the data off, wipe and install clean, and copy all the data back on.