So I finally got Leopard Friday. After spending yesterday getting backups ready properly, I installed Leopard, via the "Upgrade" method. I've done Upgrade (as opposed to Archive and Install or Erase and install) several times before. Occasionally there'd be a few kernel extension conflicts, but they'd be easy enough to resolve; at worst I'd have to do a safe boot and remove everything manually. Start 1: The upgrade took about 2 hours 20 minutes, which is an unusually long time, but hey, there's 7.1 GB to be installed. Takes a while. Restart 2: So I boot up. Right away, I can tell everything's not fine. Everything is ridiculously slow, some applications are freezing, the Finder won't open, and none of the Menu Extras work; clicking them freezes SystemUIServer. So I open up a Terminal (times like these are why I keep Terminal.app in the Dock), and check dmesg. Sure enough, Cisco VPN initialization errors as far back as the default buffer displays. So I move all the Cisco stuff to a folder in my home directory, and a few other 3rd party kernel extensions and Startup Items for good measure. I also turn off Adobe Version Cue CS2, both the app and the menu extra. I restart. Restart 3: Much faster, but still not stellar. At this point I'm wondering if it was worth it to upgrade from Tiger, but a quick check tells me that this is 10.5.0, and 10.5.2 is available as a software update. So I open up the Software Update Preference Pane, and click check for new software. While that's running, I open up Safari and download new versions of the VPN software and SideTrack, a replacement trackpad driver. Back over to Software Update. 6 updates, including the 10.5.2 combo updater. I click Download and Install. It freezes up. Thinking it's just the slowness from before, I head over to the SideTrack and VPN installers, which use different installation mechanisms; VPNClient uses the Apple installer, SideTrack has its own. I open up ST's installer and hit Uninstall, to get rid of the lingering prefpane. I open up the VPN install package, and click through to Select Disk before switching back to ST... which has frozen. Stupid uninstaller, I thought, it must be looking for the files I moved already. I'll just run the regular install instead. So I force quit it, rerun the installer, click install, and switch back to VPN... which has frozen. I switch to Software Update. Also frozen. SideTrack? Frozen. The Finder? Not frozen. I open up Activity Monitor. Yep, all the installation programs are hung, waiting, it looks like. I scroll down. Security Agent appears frozen, as does... the Core Audio Daemon? WTF? Whatever, I'll reinstall using Archive and Install so as to get a completely new System folder. As it would turn out, this was to be the high point of my Leopard experience. Restart 4: I boot to the installer, and pick A&I, preserve Users and Network Settings. Install only took 2 South Park episodes, or roughly 45 minutes. I restart. Restart 5: Finder won't run, again. I can get the Terminal open, and System Preferences. Both freeze when I click on them. I hit command-space. The Spotlight menu activates, then freezes the menu bar, except for the menu extras controlled by SystemUIServer. Oddly, all the old 3rd party preference panes appear; they don't, generally, after an A&I installation. At this point, I'm figuring some horrible permissions error. The Force Quit window won't even appear. I hard shut-down. Restart 6: I boot up into single-user mode and run fsck -fy. It doesn't find any problems. I try running diskutil repairPermissions / but it doesn't seem to do anything. I figure there's a library or system service it needs that hasn't loaded yet. I continue booting. The desktop appears much faster this time, but once it's there, all the symptoms of restart 5, except this time the menu extras don't even bother appearing. I hard-reboot. Restart 7: I hold down shift for a safe boot (Apple kernel extensions only, not that there should have been any others left after the A&I). It takes an eternity to get off the Apple logo/spinner, screen, but I figure it's running fsck in the background, and I silence that nagging voice that tells me that journaling is supposed to prevent the need for that on a hard reboot. When it finally gets off there, it goes to the login window rather quickly. I log in and... bam, everything but the Dock completely frozen, as before. So I reboot to DVD. Restart 8: I open up the Disk Utility on the Installer, and try to run Repair Permissions. It does nothing. Just sits there, like when I was trying to do it in single-user mode. I know that everything it needs is present, because I've repaired permissions from here before. I quit Disk Utility, say fuck it, and try to set up an Erase and Install installation, thinking I'll migrate my data later. I get to Select Target, click the HD... and the Mac OS X Installer (on the DVD, mind you) freezes. Something is royally fucked up on my system. The question is: is it the hard drive or the IDE controller. Why the IDE controller? Three months ago, my optical drive had problems and was replaced. I suspected the IDE controller, but was assured it was the drive. When the drive was replaced, it worked, so I didn't press it. Now I'm wondering if it really was the IDE controller. And if it's the hard drive a) I'm glad as all hell that I made a full, bootable backup yesterday, b) I'm pissed as all hell that this drive lasted 9 freaking months, c) I'm spooked as all hell that it happened to fail right when I try installing an OS upgrade. EDIT: and if it was the IDE controller, unless Apple pays for a replacement motherboard (since they should have replaced it 3 moths ago, this isn't out of the question), looks like I'll be getting a new computer a few months earlier than I'd planned.
check the EFI*? * I know nothing about apples and every time I get near one I want to be somewhere else. That said this triggered some interesting reading. My guess is with the migration to intel architecture, apples lost some of their shine. bhaahahahahahah.
I'm on a PowerBook (PPC), so no EFI. Update: Turns out that the installer wasn't completely frozen, just mostly. When it finally un-hung (1 South Park plus 1 Robot Chicken later), I restarted, and restarted the installation process. I wiped the drive and it worked. Migrating data worked pretty well too. It still seems slower than Tiger though, even though others with my hardware said it was a noticeable speedup. I'm still concerned about the hard drive.
I don't know, I think it might have to rebuild the Spotlight cache, so that could slow it down for a while. My initial reactions to Leopard were, uh, spotty (Christ, what a terrible pun) as well. It seemed a little slower (but now, it's picked up a great deal), and I think you're familiar with the issues I had with the good ol' "EVERY APPLICATION SHOULD BE IN THE APPLICATIONS DIRECTORY UNLESS WE SAY OTHERWISE" mantra that resulted in my trying to open the Tiger apps aliased to the Dock rather than the Leopard apps sitting in the Applications directory.
Yeah, I thought about that. But Spotlight's done rebuilding itself, 10.5.2 is installed, and it still seems Tiger was snappier. I still can't come up with a legitimate cause for the on-DVD installer to hang the way it did; I'm definitely concerned about the HD.
My install also took a ridiculously long time, whereas my friend's went pretty quickly, at least compared to mine.
No, it wasn't the install itself that took forever (all but the first one, anyway), it was selecting the disk for install that took a half hour. That's just not right.
