Scot’s Newsletter Blog

Last weekend I posted about issues with performing an Upgrade installation of Leopard on one of my MacBook Pros. That machine is happily running Leopard now with all my data fully intact. But I learned something in the process.

I made a backup of my Tiger installation just prior to performing the upgrade and was able to boot to the backup without difficulty. I also used Disk Utility (the Mac’s onboard disk integrity check and repair tool) to check both of the partitions on the computer’s hard drive. Everything checked out, so I went ahead with the upgrade.

As detailed earlier, I ran into the hanging blue screen after installation on the first restart that many other Leopard upgraders experienced. Many people had reported that the problem cleared up for them when they followed one of two methods for removing a Mac OS X customization utility by Unsanity called Application Performance Enhancement (APE). I didn’t have APE installed on my system, but it had been there and uninstalled with leave-behinds. I used Target disk mode to access the hard drive and remove the offending files. That didn’t solve my problem, so I decided to resort to my backup. So I removed the same offending files there just to be safe, wiped my boot volume, and copied my backup to the boot volume. During the copy process I got the error message that I didn’t have rights to copy three or four unnamed files — a message that made no real sense. And it was at that point that I knew I was in for it.

(more…)

Stop the presses! Something appears to be wrong with Apple’s Leopard OS X 10.5 upgrade-installation process — at least on some Macs. I ran into the problem on one Mac. It manifests itself as a never-ending “blue screen” (not a Windows term, mind you) after Leopard completes “successful” installation, on the first restart. Many others have encountered the same issue, and you can see evidence of that in the Apple Discussions area in the thread titled Installation appears stuck on a plain blue screen.

If you read through the thread (as well as many others on other forums), you’ll find that various things are blamed for the problem, including an add-on customization utility called Application Enhancement (APE) by Unsanity.

The Apple Discussion thread offers a solution that involves booting in single-user mode, which requires you to hold down the S key while your Mac boots. Apparently that works for some people, but on my MacBook Pro 15, the only boot option that worked at all was Target Disk Mode (which lets you plug in a firewire cable and address the drive from another Mac as if it were an external drive).

(more…)

With Apple’s new OS X 10.5 operating system due to ship at 6PM (wherever you are in the world) tomorrow, the question millions of Mac users are asking themselves is: Should I spend $129 on this thing yet? The short answer is: Yes and no, but probably not in that order.

At Computerworld, we’ve put together the quintessential examination of the new Apple OS commonly referred to as Leopard. Check out: In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights. Be sure to check out the First Look at Leopard Image Gallery for a complete visual tour of the new OS, complete with a screencam of the Stacks feature.

I like Leopard. The new OS X has over 300 new features according to Apple (I didn’t stop to count them). There are literally oodles of small tweaks and changes. Things like, when you select Shut Down from the Apple menu, the new default countdown time is 60 seconds, not two minutes. (Yeah, I went for something pretty mundane that you probably haven’t read in a hundred other Leopard reviews.)

(more…)