My Leopard Installation Adventure(+ Tips)
The DVD install disk for Mac OS X 10.5: Leopard arrived at noon. Unfortunately, I had some stuff I had to get done, so I couldn’t start the installation process until about three, but when the hour finally arrived, I stuck the DVD into my Mac mini’s drive, listened to it click and spin for a moment, and then…there it was: the sound I’d been dreading since I clicked the “Buy” button on Amazon early last week: chug, chunk, chunk, zzzzz.
It’s the sound of my mini spitting the disk back out at me. No error message. Nothing. Just the disc spit back out me. Shit.
To be fair, I’ve been having this issue with my Mac mini since at least last winter, if not earlier, but the issue is so sporadic that I hoped it would, somehow, by the grace of the Janus-faced Mac gods, just work.
It did not.
For those of you who may have found this page by searching for help on installing Leopard on a Mac mini with a Matshita CD-RW CW-8123 combo drive, I’m sorry to say it, but you’re shit out of luck. I went through all the steps I knew or could discover through Google, including resetting the PMU, but the plain truth of the matter is the Matshita disc drives just plain suck and short of getting yours replaced, there’s nothing you can do about it.
It took me an hour to face this fact.
Luckily, my wife has an iBook, so once I gave up all hope of installing from my disc drive, I decided it was time to take advantage of the Mac’s FireWire target disk mode. Not so luckily, I didn’t have a 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable in the house. I live across the street from my village’s hardware store, but a quick check revealed that they only carry USB cables. Unfortunately, living in rural Vermont means the nearest Staples is thirty-five minutes away.
One hour and ten minutes later and I’m ready to try again.
I rip the cables from that really sharp kind of plastic packaging that some terrorist will some day use to take over an airplane, and plug it into my wife’s iBook. Then, because that’s the way my world works, I decide: “Let’s try the disk drive one more time.” So I stick the DVD in, listen to it whirl, and then…it mounts.
No shit.
Once I wipe the splooge off my pants, I double-click the “Install Mac OS X” icon. The computer restarts (as it’s supposed to), but then…whir, wizz, spit…it ejects the DVD and boots into Mac OS X 10.4, as if it was just a normal restart. Fucker.
To be honest though, I didn’t care that much. I had just dropped some cash on a new FireWire cable, and I didn’t want it to be a waste. So I click into my System Preferences, set my mini up for target disk mode, restart it, plug in the cable, insert the DVD into the iBook, double-click the icon, restart, and voila!
The install process has begun.
An hour and a half later, and it’s done. The good news is that I got a bunch of reading done.
Anyway, I restart the mini. Because I chose to upgrade (as opposed to Archive & Install or Clean Install), the desktop loads my previous picture and all my login items (by the way, apparently, the Last.fm player doesn’t work on Leopard, not on mine anyway). But then I notice that the menu bar isn’t coming in. The new dock has loaded, and the menu items in the right corner have loaded (Spotlight, the Clock, etc.), but not the menu bar itself. And there it is, sitting in the top left corner of my monitor: the spinning beach ball.
It’s okay, I tell myself. I just installed a brand new operating system. The computer probably has a ton of things it has to do the first time the OS loads, Spotlight indexing, for example. It’s okay, I repeat, it’s okay.
That’s when my wife comes in and asks if I wanted to get my ass kicked…which is code for “Play Super Smash Bros. Melee on the Nintendo Cube.” That’s fifteen minutes right there, I think. That should be plenty of time for the mini to get it’s shit together. “Sure,” I answer, and off we go.
To let you know where my head is at during the entire melee: She does, indeed, kick my ass.
I come back down to the office, check out the monitor, and…FUCK! The beach ball is still spinning. God damn it!
For those who are keeping track: I’ve now been installing Leopard for almost five hours and I’ve yet to even click one of the new friggin’ stacks to see how they look. Hurrah for Apple’s legendary ease-of-use!
Luckily, I’ve still got the iBook, so I jump on the Interweb and start searching for help. My keywords: “Finder dead spinning leopard install.”
God bless, Google.
But more than that, God bless Zimwy, a dedicated member of the MacNN forums, who discovered the process for fixing this problem (I would love to hear how he first discovered the cause of this issue).
I don’t know why, but apparently, if you have a DivxNetworks folder in your Library/Application Support folder, it totally screws up the loading process of the Leopard Finder. Zimwy gives instructions on how to fix this issue using the terminal, but if you’ve got another Mac in the house, you probably don’t have to use the terminal…or at least, I didn’t. I just used the iBook to log into my mini the normal way (i.e., through the Network folder), then I went to the offending folder, changed the name (as Zimwy instructed) from “DivxNetworks” to “DivxNetworks.prev”, then I restarted the mini (by holding down the power button for a few seconds), waited for it to boot…and…and…and…
VOILA!
Six hours. But still. Done. I run Leopard now.
This is my first full day with it, and already I can tell it’s going to take some getting used to. The addition of Spaces is a habit changer, plain and simple. I have to figure out how to integrate it into my workflow. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to use Time Machine until I get a new external HD (the one I’ve got is filled with too much music). Also, Cover Flow in the Finder is cool, but weird (for one, when you resize a window, the Cover Flow section gets bigger, not the list of files below it, which seems counter-intuitive).
The new To Do Items feature in Mail is a little buggy still. For some reason, the menu you use to create a To Do item from a mail message isn’t coming up on my computer, and when I try to edit from the To Do Items manager, every click closes the editor, so changing the time for an alarm, for example, takes four clicks: one to set the hour, two to set each number in the minute (i.e., “1″ and “5″ for 15), and one to set the alarm to A.M. or P.M. That’s pretty annoying.
Of course, that’s what you get for installing a brand-new operating system. Most sane people will wait until 10.5.1 comes out, but as I mentioned before: I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
The goods news is that my computer seems significantly faster than it did
yesterday. And at the end of the day, that’s what I was looking for. Not Feature A or Feature B, but speed. And it seems I’ve got it now.
It’ll be fun to see how long it lasts.