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Level 1

10 points

Snow leopard upgrade fails

Hi,

I run 10.5.8 on my iMac and just bought a Snow Leopard DVD from Apple to upgrade to 10.6. I launched the installation DVD and installed the upgrade - all seemed to behave fine, except that the restart hangs at the spinning wheel. I gave it 3 hours but it never progressed beyond the spinning wheel. I can force the system off and reboot with option key pressed. The internal hard drive comes up as one of the startup disk options and it claimes to have SnowLeopard installed but when I select it, again it hangs at spinning wheel. I tried to re-start from the DVD and repeat the installation procedure - same result. As an aside, I happened to have an external drive with a bootable clone of my dauther's MacBook Pro which runs Snow Leopard and interestingly, my iMac booted from that system just fine.

So, I ended up restoring Leopard from Timemachine, so I'm now exactely back to where I started.... What am I missing? Any suggestions to try? I do need to upgrade becasue a piece of software that I ant to use is not compatible with Leopard but requres Snow Leopard or Lion.

Thanks

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM

Posted on Jan 22, 2012 9:01 PM

19 replies

aspalten

Level 2

315 points

Mar 18, 2012 3:49 PM in response to PM-R

Thanks. Unfortunately, this does not work. I have tried to perform this operation on a clean external drive. I can install SL fine but when migration assistance pulls the settings over from the Leopard copy, it causes the sytem to hang on the next re-boot. There does not seem to be a way to capture the setup form the Leopard environment even though that runs flawlessly under 10.5.8. I'd still love to hear other ideas to pull this off because it the absence of a global solution, I believe that I'm forced to curstomize all apps individually, which means find the settings for each application and try one by one or, for example, loose all the detail of say the iTunes library (i.e. all songs, movies, etc are now checked again and labelled "unviewed" - which is a huge pain, since my library is huge).

I'll try your suggested path one more time, but I don;t hold out much hope

PM-R

Level 1

4 points

Mar 18, 2012 4:33 PM in response to aspalten

And I guess that you can't get it to boot into 'Safe Boot Mode" during a cold boot??

Maybe have a look at http://pondini.org/OSX/Migrate.html

Or:

- on next clean reinstall, setup a "TestUser" admin account and them later setup your Username as anotther admin user and then try Migration Assistant.

- Or maybe use Carbon Copy Cloner instead as it gives you much more options to select or deselect what you want 'cloned' back or not.

PS: does you backup Leopard drive boot and work.

If so, was Disk Utility used to repair and verify the volume??

If not. try that first.

Maybe???

aspalten

Level 2

315 points

Mar 19, 2012 8:14 PM in response to PM-R

Yes, the Leopard backup boots fine. And yes, have repaired volume many times.

I have now decided to bite the bullet and re-consifuge all my aps and data. Painful, but it's getting to the point where I have spend too many hours fiddling with trying to make this work. Big pain but: c"est la vie...

Thanks for all the help - especially PM-R adn Kappy!

Andrew

PM-R

Level 1

4 points

Mar 19, 2012 8:40 PM in response to aspalten

Just one last suggestion you could try.

Boot from your working Leopard volume, run any Software Updates installs, run DU and do Repairs/ Verify etc. and then use CCC to clone to another NEW external backup drive assuming that everything work properly and as expected.

Even two backups is almost minimal.

Then use the Snow Leopard 10.6.x install to upgrade your normal booted updated Leopard volume and hen finished and rebooted, run Software Update until you're up to date.

But I have a horrible feeling that you've done a similar procedure and without success.

Sorry, but I can't realy help further.

Snow leopard upgrade fails