Five frustrating, wasted days

Before I begin, I need to point out that I do not claim a cause and effect relationship between what I’ve done and the result it produced. Still, the story bears relating. Because of the length of this post, I’ll offer my advice from what I’ve learned so that you can skip the rest:

1. Purchase an external hard drive of at least the size of your Mac’s internal drive

2. Boot the Leopard install DVD and when the Tools/Utilities menu appears, start Disk Utility

3. Partition your external drive, and be sure to click Options to create a GUID partition

4. Click on the icon for your internal drive’s OS X partition

5. Click “New Image” from the toolbar

6. In the destination dialog box, choose the name of your external drive

7. For image type, choose Read Only. The default is “compressed,” but this is extremely slow

8. Once this completes, it’s now safe to install Leopard on your internal drive

You should do this, or its equivalent, for any OS upgrade.

As I related in my prior blog, I checked into a hotel so that I could have uninterrupted, quiet time set aside for my review of Leopard. It had been my intent to blog throughout the process of installing and migrating Leopard from the internal hard drive of the MacBook Pro loaned to me by Apple. That drive had a fully working copy of Tiger.

For safety’s sake, I installed first to a small external FireWire drive, a process that went exceedingly well. But with an internal drive of 150 GB and an external FireWire drive of only 18 GB, there was no point in attempting to use Migration Assistant to migrate my apps and files. Booted from the FireWire drive, I was able to navigate the MacBook Pro’s internal drive, and launch applications from it, without difficulty.

I thought the wisest next step would be to do a complete backup of the MacBook Pro’s internal drive to an external device large enough to contain it. So I shut down, unplugged the FireWire drive, plugged in a known good 250 GB external USB 2.0 drive and powered back up.

[mark this paragraph; you’ll be returning to it] The MacBook Pro did not boot. It went completely unresponsive, stuck at the white background where the Apple logo and spinning animation usually appear. With the install disc in the drive, holding the C key down (the shortcut for booting from the CD/DVD), nothing happened even after waiting several minutes. I plugged the external 18 GB FireWire drive back in and held down the Option key to bring up the boot volume selection menu. The drive’s icon appeared–neither the internal drive’s icon nor the install DVD’s appeared–but clicking on the arrow beneath the FireWire drive it had no effect; the button changed color to indicate its response, but after repeated clicks, nothing happened.

With only wired network service at the hotel, I had to use my BlackBerry to go to Apple’s support site to find the magic key sequence to clear the system’s non-volatile configuration RAM (Option+Command+P+R+Power). This caused the external FireWire drive to boot to Leopard, and once booted, icons for the internal drive and the install DVD appeared. I launched Disk Utility to check for problems on the MacBook Pro’s internal drive and got thousands of notices of invalid hard links. I repeated the repair process and the internal drive checked out clean. So I set the startup drive to the internal disk and rebooted.

For the system’s reaction to this, re-read from the paragraph marked above to this sentence. At no point was I able to boot directly from the install DVD at startup. However, I was able to boot from the FireWire drive, click “Install Mac OS X,” and reboot from the DVD.

Using the boot DVD’s Disk Utility, I asked to image the MacBook Pro’s internal drive to the 250 GB external USB drive. The process failed partway through with an I/O error. I was able to install Leopard to the 250 GB USB drive, and I attempted to fire up Migration Assistant. It began assembling the catalog of data that I could import, and while doing this the system rebooted itself. Return to the paragraph marked above.

I am now working from the external USB drive. The C key still will not boot from the DVD. At this point, the files from my internal drive are visible, and that volume passes verify and repair. Now comes the task of attempting to recover essential files like e-mail and address book by hand (from the command line; doing so with Finder complains that I lack proper permission). However, I have no backup and cannot create one.

To say that this has been a frustrating exercise is an understatement. Very few things anger me more than wasted time and money, and this has been both.

Why did all of this happen? I haven’t the faintest idea. I only know that prior to installing Leopard on the external FireWire drive, everything was working perfectly, and I had every expectation of a clean install and a pleasant weekend of blogging.

I can’t help that some will read this as a cautionary tale. Don’t. Something bizarre happened here, some juxtaposition of a hardware failure with an attempt to install Leopard. In any case, I’m frozen in state until I can recover essential files my MacBook Pro’s hard drive. I have a backup image that’s about two months old; perhaps I’ll start with that.

It may surprise you, but this does not color my opinion of Leopard in the least. Instead of blogging my progress as I had planned, I’m moving straight to a full review, which will have no reference to this post.