Problems Installing Leopard? My Quick And Dirty Guide To Major Software Upgrades

November 1st, 2007

AppleThere are a few articles today about folks encountering problems installing Leopard. I thought I’d post my thought process on how I managed the upgrade. Right now I have two machines (a MacBook and Mac mini) running Leopard with few issues.

  • If it’s not essential to upgrade, hold off for a few weeks to let others take the first step and get hosed. I’m always a bit gutsy as an “early adopter” but that’s because I feel if I encounter any issues, I’d be able to overcome them… and have fun doing it (a clean install? Cool!). Not everyone has the temperament for that.
  • If you can’t afford to have your computer disabled for an extended period of time don’t upgrade. At the very least you’ll be without your computer for a few hours as the software installs, you upgrade incompatible software, or just getting used to the new OS.
  • Back up everything you can’t afford to lose. External hard drives are surprisingly cheap these days.
  • I strongly recommend having a second computer. Inevitably when I encounter a serious computer problem, there is a fix online, and I can use one computer to troubleshoot the other. A big part of my upgrade strategy is to install new software on a non-critical computer.

So here’s what I did:

  1. Installed Leopard on my MacBook first. It’s not a critical machine, has very little software installed on it, and if it died or the drive was wiped, it wouldn’t matter so much.
  2. Read this MacWorld article about preparing for Leopard.
  3. MacBook: Backed up everything to an external hard drive.
  4. MacBook: Repaired permissions via Disk Utility, verified disk.
  5. Read online about software found to be incompatible with Leopard.
  6. Read online about other people’s problems installing Leopard, namely the issue with APE and made sure I didn’t have any of those files on the MacBook.
  7. MacBook: Installed Leopard, no problems encountered.
  8. MacBook: Repaired permissions via Disk utility, verified disk.
  9. MacBook: Checked all the critical apps to see if they worked on Leopard.

After two days of messing around with Leopard on the MacBook, I felt it was stable enough that I could install Leopard on the Mac mini, our “primary” computer.

  1. Mac mini: Updated drivers for peripherals that aren’t ever connected to the MacBook (printer, Wacom tablet).
  2. Repeated all steps above for the Mac mini.
  3. Had more critical apps to check, namely Adobe Creative Suite and Quicken, and that the printer and other peripherals still worked.

At this point there are still some strange things going on with the Keychain on the Mac Mini (Dashboard widgets and Mail still asking for passwords) but nothing that’s ruining productivity.

While I do have sympathy with folks who have had problems installing Leopard, even as an “early adopter” I’d say I’m pretty cautious in terms of upgrading (I have hard drive failures, water spills, and previous Apple software versions to make me wary) - there’s nothing wrong with being overly cautious when it comes to necessities. If I had one computer, and a copy of Photoshop 7 that I absolutely couldn’t be without because of an impending deadline - I wouldn’t have installed Leopard - despite that it’s from Apple.

Still I can’t recall an instance where I had major problems with an OS X upgrade - they’ve all been pretty painless.

As a final note, I highly recommend reading Mac websites (MacFixit, MacOSXHints, MacSurfer, Apple Discussion forums) to get a sense if there are any major issues before upgrading.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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Viewing 3 Comments

    • ^
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    I had minimal problems on my MacBook Pro. I did the 'upgrade' first - and of course backed up my precious music files first. The rest of the stuff I could survive without (that's totally not true, but I use Mozy to backup anything critical anyway).

    It went fine, aside from ending out w/ two versions of X11 installed, and Gimp not working at all.

    Then I decided oh what the hell, lets try the 'wipe it clean' update and did that the next day. Now I only have one version of X11 installed, and Gimp still doesn't work.

    All in all, I'd have to say it went rather hassle free - and I had APE installed during the first 'upgrade' and it didn't bug-out anything. I would rate my experience(s) as "very smooth". Not perfect, but pretty close I suppose.
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    I just installed it on my MacBook Pro and prayed...which was probably foolish. Thankfully no real problems.

    I guess the fact that my main word processor these days is Google Docs and so much of my data is stored online, I was less freaked out about losing critical data/apps.

    I'll be more careful with the PowerMac desktop though -- fortunately I have an external hard drive that I can migrate all the essential files over to.

    I haven't tried the updated version of bootcamp yet to see if my Windows install is working right though...
    • ^
    • v
    With most of my "at home" stuff on my Macbook, it was a bit gutsy (stupid?) of me to go out and buy Leopard and install it without doing any reading online. So far, all of the programs I use on a regular basis works fine. Only flavor stuff, like Shapeshifter, do not currently work.

    Oh and backup? That's why I bought Leopard and an accompanying external hard drive. hehehe
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