Antonio Jorge Lulic is a freelance web developer and musician based in London. He also writes and takes photos.
It was just over two years ago that I was working for Apple reseller KRCS in Leeds, right about the time that Tiger came out. I vividly recall spending the best part of two days taping together and spraying black the packing boxes of iPod Minis to make a four-foot high X-shaped standee on which to mount Tiger boxes in the stores window in the run up to the release.
The night before Tiger was launched, we installed it on the in store machines. Having set a couple going, I began to notice that they were hanging on blue screens when booting up after the install. my first response was “Oh, shit. Tiger is fucked! We have to sell it tomorrow! Argh!”. Half an hour later, after we’d set all of the Macs we had DVDs for installing, the first one had finished booting. Imagine my surprise! What a relief! Phew!
As I write this, on my MacBook (which Leopard has rejected on the grounds that it isn’t happy with my partition type, given that I restored my hard disk from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup last year), my PowerMac has rebooted after Leopard’s installer finished. I’m staring at a big blue screen, and ever so slightly concerned. But every now and then, the Mac’s hard disk twitches, whirrs, reads, writes, and I know that somewhere down there, it’s doing something, and I’ll see it in the morning.
It’s just taking it’s time.
UPDATE: After four hours of staring, smugly, at my blue screens, I realised something was very wrong. I followed Apple’s instructions to no avail; and I don’t even have Application Enhancer installed.
I rebooted, did an Archive and Install overnight, and woke up to find that installation had failed with some vague error like APPLE_INSTALLER_NOT_WORKING or something. My startup disk is no longer bootable, so I’m nipping out at lunch to buy a MyBook to Target Disk my stuff onto via my MacBook, then I’ll clean install.
This is what I get for being smug. And, also, not taking John Gruber’s advice:
If you don’t back up daily - or at least very regularly - you’re foolish. If you don’t back up before upgrading your OS, you’re really foolish.
Once bitten, John. Once bitten.
October 31st, 2007 at 8:57 am
You’ve seen this, yeah?