Upgrade/Cat Scratch Fever

Rob Cottingham’s excellent cartoon is part of my subject for this posting: My OS X 10.5 Leopard install: The Wrath of Shere Khan. (I know, I know, Shere Khan was a Tiger, not a Leopard, but the Star Trek Pun was just too good to pass up, and besides, my upgrade to ‘Tiger’ was just fine, and happened years ago.). Last Sunday I thought I’d try and install this brand new Mac OS on my desktop system, a Dual-processor G5 that used to be the King of the Hill, back when Mac’s used the PowerPC chip…(oh well…).

Well, it didn’t go so well. The first attempt at an upgrade started, and then after a minute or two aborted itself. When I brought the machine back to life, it wouldn’t boot off the internal drive any more, but would boot off the new system install DVD. The upgrade installer now said that in order to install the new OS, I would need to first erase the hard disk and then install. ‘OK’ , I said. ‘Good thing I had a backup of everything.’ (I’d had the good sense to duplicate everything to an external drive on Saturday night, which I could now boot off of. So no panicking, I hadn’t really lost anything.) ‘All right, I’ll install a new system, and then migrate all of my applications, files, etc. to it using the Migration Assistant program from Apple. That usually works.’

So, Install attempt 2 began. It worked with no apparent problems. It wiped the disk and installed a brand new, virgin copy of OS X 10.5. I registered the software, and then ran the Migration Assistant. Some 3 hours later, I rebooted the Mac to find a computer that was essentially running like a slow-motion movie. I could start it up, click on things or double-click to open them, but they responded minutes later. *Sigh* This wouldn’t do. So, with the hour growing late, I went off to bed.

The next evening (after work), I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to install the virgin system again (Install 2, Attempt 3, for the record), and then, rather than running the Migration Assistant (which had moved all of the old junk over from my old system effectively bringing my new system to a standstill), I’d have to rebuild my system bit-by-bit, the old fashioned way. That was Monday.

Today is Thursday, and I’m nearly back. Most apps have been reinstalled, with a few notable exceptions (Adobe Creative Suite Version 2, which is a behemoth and Microsoft Office for Macintosh have yet to be put in, and ‘The Missing Sync’ – which I use to sync my Treo and Audio Hijack – which I use to record radio shows from Boston via the Internet, will be the last additions). However, iLife and iWork are on there, along with my iTunes library and iPhoto pictures. The fact is, I’m running out of disk space pretty quickly. I think the time has come to migrate my iTunes library to an external drive, as my ‘Music’ Folder now takes up nearly 100 Gig. While I love many features of the new OS, it would have been nice to have been a quick and simple upgrade. The fact is, I’d simply accumulated too much digital grime in the old system, and the new one was probably incompatible with 1 (or maybe more) things running in the background that I might not have even been using any more!