Bitten By A Tiger: Mac OS X 10.4 Install Nightmare
I performed the Tiger upgrade yesterday, purchasing it from CompUSA (they were having a release party for it, but it was anything but a party). While Mail was importing my emails the screen saver came on. When I tried to log back in the screen stayed black but I could see the cursor. I let it set for 45 minutes finally deciding it was in a coma and force rebooted it.
When I logged back in I found a horrific site, everything had been set to factory defaults. The dock was at the bottom with the standard set of apps, the back ground pict was set to default. Mail had no sign of my accounts and wanted to know passwords and such. MY KEYCHAIN HAD BEEN WIPED OUT! DEAR LORD NOOOOOOOO!!!! Thankfully I make a nightly back up of my home folder, which I was able to restore a copy of my keychain. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to restore it using the Backup application, because it’s stupid. I had to break into the package contents of the back up and copy it. Mail is not working properly. It will not apply any rules to incoming messages and is pretty slow to display mailbox contents. It continually downloads the same messages and instead of showing their contents gives this message, “The message from username concerning ?Message Subject? has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.” WTF?
Finally I had a heck of a time getting Safari to work. I had downloaded Saft a while back, which was still installed in Safari. It prevented it from launching, instead giving a dialog box with the option to disable it but not allowing you to click it.
Update 05/01/05 06:39 PM: What a nightmare this has been. First I want to think iBlog, because as I wrote this entry (now for the 3rd time) it crashed after saving the entry, and deleted the entry upon relaunch. I hear Ecto calling.
I tried several times to import my mail, dam good thing I make a nightly back up of my users data. But Tiger seemed to be eating itself, menu items started to disappear.. I had 25GB of free space when I installed Tiger, I was under 300MB when I gave up. System performance was horrid. Never got .Mac sync to work either.
There was only one thing to do, reformat and fresh install. Something I wanted to do anyways but it’s such a pain. I was planning on getting the thing set up right in Tiger and then cloning it so I could just import my user data, but that wasn’t going to happen. I copied what I thought I needed and to my various HDs and wiped the drive.
I’m running Tiger now and everything is much better. Still need to turn on FileVault for my account. Mail never did import everything correctly and I had to recreate all my rules. Email from the last 2 months are missing.
Related Items:
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Oh dear.
Now I’m definitely waiting until I buy my G5.
THat sounds like a terrible experience.
I’m not upgrading yet for a few reasons. One of which that many apps quit working till developers get Tiger upgraded versions out.
Man. I wish that was my only problem. I managed to purchase not one, but two! corrupt disks, and after spending six hours on the phone with Apple, had to wipe my entire hard drive and reinstall 10.3 from scratch. I’m going to be reinstalling software until well into next week…
I had a horror-free upgrade. My iBook G3 was on jaguar and is now running much more quickly on Tiger.
I backed up everything essential to my iPod and then disconnected it. Had to reboot once initially, but everything’s been (mostly) smooth since… The problems have only been my own, not the other way around.
K