-
I’ve been slowly working up to installing Snow Leopard since it came out, I just hadn’t had the time. Last night I decided to finally take the plunge. This is my tale.
I insert the CD, the install OS X window pops up. I start the process. On the first screen it scans your hard drive to make sure it can install successfully. It does it’s little scan and I get the Yellow Exclamation Point of Death (YEPoD) and a warning to the extent of “OS X can’t be installed on this drive because it can not be used as a start up drive.” And that’s it. Nothing more, no help, nothing. Just basically, “nope.”
I should point out right here that if I wasn’t somewhat technically… capable, for lack of a better term, I would probably just be pissed and give up. I know OS X is supposed to be easy, but you need to be able to delve deeper.
My first thought is that my hard drive partitions are causing the problem. I use rEFIt to dual boot Ubuntu, which Apple doesn’t officially support, but hey, at least it supports dual booting windows (partial sarcasm). I fire up disk utility and try to delete my Ubuntu partition.
Can’t do it.
Restart the computer with install disc in. Erase Ubuntu partition. Return those twenty gigs to my OS X and only remaining partition. Start up the install process again.
YEPoD.
Eff it, I did a Time Machine backup last night, format the entire hard drive. Run a clean install on a clean hard drive.
Success! Expose, iChat, and the background color of menu items on the dock have all changed, no new features my ass.
Time to get all my apps and preferences and what not back. Fire up Time Machine, find the backup I want, and “restore.” Do I want to overwrite, merge, or ignore duplicate items? Overwrite, please. Progress bar, five hours to go, okay.
“You do not have appropriate permissions to overwrite this folder.”
The whole thing stops. What? So you hit an exception and then just stop the process without telling me how far you got and leave me completely high and dry? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Back to Time Machine, select Applications, Users, and Library.
Chug, chug, chug. Fail.
Back to Time Machine, drill into Applications, select a few third party apps, start the process, chug, chug, chug.
Fail.
Fuck.
Restart computer with install disc. Utilities > Restore from backup. Select Time Machine backup.
Chug chug chug.
Restart.
OS X Leopard exactly the way it was the day before I did all of this.
And that’s where I am. Hopefully I can just do a Snow Leopard install over all this instance since the partitions are gone, but I’ve lost my will to try for the short term.
