Leopard Blue Screen of Death et al.

Fedex delivered my Leopard install disk at about 10:30 Friday morning.

I must have been one of the first callers yesterday to Apple about the installation problems with Leopard. I called at 3:00PM PDT, immediately as they started providing Leopard support. It really is so disappointing. I missed the Leopard party at my local (Palo Alto) Apple Store as a result.

The tech support guys were caught entirely unaware and I spent 3 HOURS on the phone Friday afternoon.

Here is a note on the problem for those that are stuck today.

The problem is that you have installed applications that are trying to start up at boot time but fail and lock up (or have some similar side effect). You will see this if you boot from the installation disk, open a terminal and look at the system log. Leopard has installed correctly, it just can't start.

So, how to fix? Here is what you do - Jo the product specialist gave me this - and IT IS A PAIN. You have to reinstall but before pressing continue select the options button (you'll find it) and select "Install and Archive User." This will install Leopard but copy out your user space - including all your application profiles (one of which is causing the problem). In my case it looked like HP software that was causing the problem. So it was not one of the esoteric genetics or molecular biology programs that I have installed, it was something that is widely distributed. I had 3 HRS but that was not enough for a full diagnostic on my part.

Of course, if you know what you are looking for, by analyzing your system log that contains a record of the boot problems, you can go in and fix it from a terminal when you boot from the install disk. But this is not for the weak at heart. Given that, I wish now that this is what I had done - Jo did not explain exactly what this would do and it may not do exactly what he expected.

So, this will boot Leopard to a login screen and ONE, and only ONE, of your profiles. Which sucks because in my case the chosen profile was one that I had made for my son that was restricted and I could not get an administrator login immediately - and of course, the install had not copied any administrator profiles.

You have to use the install disk again to boot and reset the admin password - and then reboot and log in as root.

How to boot from the install disk or get back to the install disk from the blue screen? Restart (hold down the power key if necessary) and press and keep your finger on "C." This will bring you back to the install screen. The terminal and other utilities are on the menu bar of the second or third screen (as is the "options" button mentioned above).

Your old profiles will be in a top level folder called "Previous Systems" and you will have to copy the files you want to a new profile (including your iTune Library). You will have to reinstall some of your applications too - and I hope you kept all your licenses. I had to go dig for my Oxygen license.

One other thing. I tried to sync my iDisk - it spent some time filling up my entire disk, eating ALL the disk space, before I realized the problem and had to delete the 41GB sync it had created (I only have about 600MB on my iDisk and 10GB space, to the most it should have done is create a 10GB virtual disk).

It really is unfortunate that the problems manifest in a "blue screen" - expect Microsoft to be sympathetic and say "Look, see how hard it is!"

Someone in QA will be fired. In fact all of the Leopard team QA should be fired.

Comments

[Larry]

Leopard. What a disappointment. Finder hangs. Have not found any work around that works. Did a clean install. Same old spinning beachball. Fire the whole damn dept. that allowed this buggy release.

[John]

Had a problem like this on a 2008 mac pro running leopard - the computer started randomly quitting apps and then wouldn't restart, reaching the point where a cursor appears, but then the cursor disappears and it's back to the blue screen with the circling black stuff indicating loading - kept switching between the two. Reinstall worked (also target disk mode worked - but not migration assistant. was able to transfer to another machine manually but this proved unnecessary in the end luckily!)