Converting my Mac from Tiger to Leopard

On February 9, 2008 I finally decided it was time to upgrade my Mac from OS X Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5). I had been holding off because my preferred backup solution (SuperDuper) was not yet compatible with Leopard. An upgrade to the SuperDuper software gave me the guts to decide to do the upgrade. Unfortunately, the upgrade was not without incident. My decision to wait until the backup software was compatible turned out to be an excellent decision. I have chronicled my experiences below.

Full Backup

The first thing I did was make sure that I had a full, bootable backup that worked. That is, I updated my backup and rebooted the machine from the backup to be sure it was bootable. Then, I updated the backup again to be sure it had the exact image on the machine without the updates that would happen from the reboot. Like I said, this was the best things I did.

First Attempt - Ut oh!

My first attempt at the upgrade was unsuccessful. It validated the disk (for a long time) an then started copying the data only to fail and leave my hard drive in a state that it could not be booted to. I booted to my trusty backup and checked the disk. It indicated that it needed to be repaired (which I did), but it could not repair the disk. So, the only true alternative seemed to be to do a full recovery—an operation that took about two hours to accomplish, but when I was done Tiger was back up and running.

Second Attempt - Successful

My second attempt (after making sure I had a nice, clean, repaired disk) went much better. It installed Leopard on the machine and it booted successfully upon completion. I also checked to be sure I could boot to the Tiger image (which was successful as well).

Oddities

BOINC failed

Upon restart, the BOINC grid manager complained that it needed to be reinstalled. I did and it seemed to be fine. Just odd that it would need to be reinstalled.

Thunderbird - Weird, but Okay

When I brought up Thunderbird, some of my folders were missing and all of my personalized settings seemed to be gone. I was somewhat panicked that my folders had been lost. I exited Thunderbird and then restarted and everything seemed to be there. The only thing that I had to re-set was my in box preferences. Weird.

Wireless Oddities

One thing I noticed was that when the machine came back from sleeping, it did not seem to be able to reconnect wirelessly. I found a procedure that helped me re-set everything and I have not had the problem since. I also upgraded to 10.5.2 that day, so either one of those could have fixed it.

Automatic Power Up

My most perplexing problem was the machine powering up when I plugged it in. It was very strange. I'd plug it in and all of a sudden it would start up—without me pressing the power switch. It even did it when the lid was closed. I found a link in the support forum that indicated I was not the only person that ran into this problem. Eventually, I called AppleCare and they had me reset the PMU (remove the battery, wait, hold the power switch down for 10 seconds, re-insert the battery) and everything was fine after that. What an odd problem, though.

Printing

Unfortunately, all of my printer settings were lost. I thought I'd have the same type of problems I did when I originally set it up, but I wound up just having to add the printer again. Phew.