A Tiger Bite


Every so often I get to go through the fun of installing a new operating system. Recently I installed Apple's newest version of OS X, the 10.4 "Tiger" release, on my 700 MHz iBook. The process was quite a bit more painful than I anticipated, thanks to a bad Tiger DVD...


As always with an operating system install, I opted for the "Erase and Install" option to start off with a completely clean slate. Yes, that means some pain in bringing over my applications and data, but the benefit is that there's no legacy garbage hanging around the system, and as a developer who likes to twiddle with things I always manage to accumulate such garbage. (OS X also offers an "Archive and Install" option, but my iBook's puny 20 GB drive doesn't have the spare sectors for it.)

So, first things first. I fixed up my file permissions with Disk Utility, then used Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to create a complete bootable backup copy of my system onto an external Firewire drive. This works so well and with so little effort that one has a hard time believing that Mike makes it available for free. (He does accept donations, however, and I strongly recommend supporting this software by chipping in $5 or more if you can.)

I disconnected my Firewire drive, inserted the Tiger DVD, and kicked off the installer.

The clever folks in Cupertino recognize that manufacturing problems can arise in DVD production, so after telling the installer I wanted to "Erase and Install" and selecting a few options (turning off extra language support and adding in X11), the installer checked the DVD media for problems... and at 67%, it found one, and told me I was out of luck and would have to try again. I took the DVD out, cleaned it with a lint-free cloth, and tried again.

Same problem. Rats!

This time I took the DVD out, gave it a good scrubbing with a gentle LCD screen cleaner, polished it with a lint-free cloth, and on my third try, I finally got past the DVD media check. Cool!

Or at least it was cool, right up until additional fonts were being installed. Then the DVD couldn't be read. Oops.

So, clean as the DVD looked to the naked eye, there was something marginal about it. And now, as a bonus, I'd wiped my iBook's hard disk and had an unbootable machine.

Well, thought I, if the DVD is marginal, perhaps a different DVD drive would have better luck with it, and I just happened to have an external Firewire DVD drive handy. So I plugged that in, restarted the iBook while holding down the Option key to allow me to select a boot device, and booted off the Tiger disk in the external drive. The installer made it through the media check (yay!), sailed past the problem in the additional fonts (woohoo!)... and then hung completely without any fanfare at 92% complete.

Try, try again. Same setup, only by this time it was getting late so I started the installer and let it run overnight. The next morning the installer was hung again, this time at 55% complete. This was ceasing to be fun.

Okay, stop, breathe, think it through --- scuba problem management 101. I had a marginal DVD, but one which was apparently readable by my external DVD drive. There was also some sort of lockup problem that seemed to be related to installing over Firewire. And hey, wait a minute... my wife has a shiny white iBook sitting innocently nearby, and she's still sleeping... I wonder if it would be able to read the DVD successfully?

It turns out that it could. I put the Tiger DVD in its drive, and used Roxio's Toast Titanium to burn a new copy on the external Firewire drive --- one which, I hoped, my iBook would be able to read without a hitch.

That did the trick; I was able to complete the Tiger install without complication using the new DVD in my iBook's built-in drive. Much playing with Dashboard widgets ensued, and I got about the somewhat mundane business of reinstalling apps and data. Most of this process was manual; Apple's new Migration Assistant (located in Tiger's Applications / Utilities folder) crashed on me the first time, and hung on the second. Not nice. Oh well, you want something done right...

Mostly things have been good since then. I have had one crash on waking from Sleep after installing the 10.4.1 update, and I've also had the "hot corner" shortcuts stop working on me to trigger Exposé and Dashboard, a problem which cleared upon rebooting. So Tiger isn't without it's problems. On the other hand, Spotlight already came through once for me and found a misplaced document I thought had been lost forever; a pleasant, and very unexpected, surprise.

Apple also included a 30-day iWork '05 trial disk in the box, and I've started to put that through its paces. Keynote I have almost as much use for as PowerPoint (which is to say, almost none at all), but Pages seems pleasant enough to use. It took me only a very short time to re-create a legal document I'd originally written with Mellel. Pages seemed to have more intuitive style management, but given Apple's upgrade policies (which, again, brings to mind the phrase "none at all"), it'll be substantially more expensive than Mellel over time. Pity Apple insists on bundling things I have use for (Pages/iPhoto) with things that are useless to me (Keynote/GarageBand).

Posted: Sat - May 28, 2005 at 11:27 PM          

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