(Note: A follow-up, with possible solutions to Leopard installation problem, is posted in the comments. If you’re having problems installing Leopard, we recommend you read the entire post and the comments.)
I have been a mac user (and mild evangelist) since the very beginning, so don’t go accusing me of being anti-apple….
I recently installed Leopard (archive and install) on my mac book pro and everything went fine. I chose ARCHIVE and install, in case there was an issues. I figured Leopard I would have an ARCHIVE of my data to go back too. Sounds responsible, right.
So I attempt to install Leopard on my Dual G5 PowerPC (PPC), using the ARCHIVE and install feature (being responsible here, right), and Leopard totally screws up my 10.4 (Tiger Disk) up. Leopard refused to install, but left my 10.4 disk unbootable. I get the blue screen, the grey screen, the endless loop, the picture of the galaxy, with no progress. Leopard is not on the machine and Tiger won’t boot. Leopard is telling me that I have to ERASE and INSTALL. Question…. If Leopard can not be installed on the disk, why does it do anything at all? I don’t have time to reinstall every single application right now and I just want to downgrade back to Tiger (I can boot the G5 with a CD, and everything is “present” on the disk, so that’s not the problem), and I did make an external copy of my critical data. But it takes, hours — hours — to reinstall applications and configure networks, etc. I don’t have time for that right now.
So I got to the Apple Forums for help. As you would expect there are plenty of people having problems with the installation. In a classic case of blaming the victim, a good majority of the threads criticize the USER for not making a clone of their old drive before using installing Leopard.
My biggest complaint about installing Mac OSX Leopard is that apparently I was supposed to go out and buy a external firewire drive so that I could make a clone of my hard drive (at a cost in the hundreds of dollars) in case Leopard messed it up. This makes about as much sense as asking Apple to include an external drive with Leopard so that people can safely use their software.
To add insult to injury, in the new Apple vs. PC commercials, the Apple guy is slamming the PC guy for Microsoft Vista and how many users have to downgrade to Microsoft XP to have a useable computer. Ironically, I am having the exact same issue, but I want to downgrade (actually I just want my Mac disk with Tiger to boot) to Tiger. Go figure.
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I wanted to see if I could help other people by trying to fix this disk. Here’s what I did.
1) I had a second hard drive in that machine, that I was using as a swap disk, so I put Leopard on it. It installed fine. The good thing was that I could see my old disk, and although it was clearly broken by the Leopard installer, I was able to get data off the disk. If you are having this problem, you may be able to load Leopard on to another disk (be it an external firewire or internal disk) and you may be able to salvage you data.
2) I then tried to see if I could repair the disk using Disk Utility. Neither the Tiger or Leopard Disk Utility (from the cd or from the hard drives) would fix the drive in question. I got a yellow or red exclamation point with a message to the effect that the ‘keys were out of order’ when I tried to verify the disk.
3) I downloaded a copy of Gentoo Linux for ppc, burned it to CD using the mac burning program, and booted my mac with that linux disk. I could again see and navigate the disks using the command line. If you are comfortable using the command line, you may be able to get your data off your hard drive that the Leopard installer broke this way.
4) I tried all the tricks I know for repairing the disk while I had it booted up with Gentoo Linux for ppc - like fsck and partitioning tools - but I could never repair the broken disk disk.
5) If you are trying to copy the USERS directory (which is probably what most people want to get off their mac when moving or upgrading a system), you may have to set up a root account if you are booted into OSX. If you try to copy the files and you are logged in with your normal account, you may run into permissions errors when you want to copy other users accounts.
While trying to figure out how to fix this problem, I found several people who suggested using a program called DiskWarrior and who claimed to have success with it. I did not have a copy and I had gotten all my critical data off the disk that Leopard broke, so I did not purchase a copy of Disk Warrior. But, if you really must have that data, it might be worth exploring it.