My four-day ordeal with 10.4.8
Since Saturday morning, I have been without a computer. I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X 10.4.8 and after rebooting, I had a kernel panic. I rebooted again - another kernel panic. I was hosed. During the weekend, I tried various reinstallation techniques, but my install DVD kept hanging at various parts of the application installation process (first iWeb, then GarageBand, then iMovie, etc.). After searching the discussion forums, I discovered that I was not the only person with this problem. By Sunday night, I had tried ten variations of the reinstall - all failed. It seems as though the MacBook Pro install disk 2 (the one with the applications), does not like to install over the top of an existing system, even if you move the Applications folder out of the way. I tried and tried - no luck. This is not good news if it happens again before Mac OS X 10.5 is released.
Monday morning, I camped out at the Apple Store. My solution? Buy a Mac OS X 10.4 install DVD since I suspected that my installer DVD was bad. The problem is, Apple doesn’t sell Mac OS X 10.4 for Intel Macs because every Intel Mac has shipped with Mac OS X 10.4! This all lead to the dreaded final option - backup the data, format, reinstall, and copy the data back. With a 120GB internal drive in the MacBook Pro, this means hours and hours and hours of work. As I already spent hours and hours and hours over the weekend trying to reinstall, this made the process even more painful.
So, I bought a 500GB external hard disk, and connected it to my kids’ iMac along with my MacBook Pro in target disk mode. Copying over 100GB of data off my MacBook Pro took forever due in large part to copy failures thanks to corrupt and/or locked files. I’d have to identify the problem files, remove them, and start again. Hours and hours were lost throughout Monday as I sat in front of a computer and stared at the screen, waiting for the copy to fail, and for me to identify the problem files before starting the process all over again. My Monday night, I had finally backed up my data and I was ready to format and start over. By 2am early Tuesday morning, my MacBook Pro was operational again, and I have spent all morning (after a short night’s sleep) copying my data back to my MacBook Pro.
Total time spent recovering over four days: 28 hours. I am not kidding. Had I given up the reinstall on Sunday and had jumped right into backup and format mode, it would have only been a total of 18 or so hours. By the way - 10.4.8 installed just fine the second time. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. I blame no one. It happens. It still sucks, though.
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