Archive&Install of Leopard taking over 29 hours & stuck at 13 mins???

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Level 1

8 points

Archive&Install of Leopard taking over 29 hours & stuck at 13 mins???

My macbook has been having a host of issues since I realised time machine backups were not running.

Slightly worried that I have just broken the whole machine but hoping someone here may have some advice.

I have repaired disk and my internal HD is fine. I repaired disk permissions and since then the machine has been completely freezing on startup, stuck on the grey apple screen with spinning wheel before eventually proceeding to the blue screen of death...

I have had to force shutdown now several times, trying to reboot in safe mode or from the Leopard disk kept failing as the machine kept ejecting the disk immediately on startup.

I left it overnight then retried booting from the disk, it started up and not sure why now but I decided I should do an archive and install of Leopard.

The install has now been running for 29 hours and has been stuck at '13 minutes remaining' for at least 6 hours.

What should I do? I am really scared to quit the installation but it doesn't seem like it's going to proceed? Please help!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Oct 17, 2012 5:32 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 18, 2012 9:19 AM in response to debzidoo1

1 - Backup all data (at least home folders but preferably whole disk) to an external disk with Carbon Copy Cloner - don't go further until you are sure everything you want to keep has been backed up and is readable

2 - Make sure your DVD drive is working

3 - Boot from OS install DVD

4 - Erase the disk

5 - Install the OS from DVD

6 - Update with Software Update

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Answer 2

debzidoo1 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2012 12:14 PM in response to Neville Hillyer

Thanks for your reply Neville. Unfortunately all my issues started when Time Machine kept failing and I received error message after error message. I was advised to clone with carbon copy cloner but even this has failed. My latest successful time machine backup was early September. It seems that my only option is to wipe the drive and start over with that backup? I was concerned it was a RAM issue but having run Rember and Memtest my RAM is apparently ok.

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Answer 3

Oct 18, 2012 12:37 PM in response to debzidoo1

There is something seriously wrong if Carbon Copy Cloner fails.

Do you know that your early September backup will work?

Is there data later than this which you would like to recover?

If you have firewire and another Mac you could try Target Disk Mode?

It is for situations like this that I always split my main disk into at least 2 volumes with working OSs on each volume.

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Answer 4

debzidoo1 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2012 1:27 PM in response to Neville Hillyer

Oh dear 😟 When you say "seriously wrong" do you have any ideas what the problem is? I have run verify disk and this has continuously said the disk is fine. Repairing disk permissions did find something which was repaired but this was when the seemingly major problems started with the mac refusing to start up, just sitting at the grey apple screen or even worse the blue screen of death.

The archive and install did finally finish, and everything appears as it should do, I am feeling more confident that my hard drive is ok (or at least not completely past recovery). I've booked an appt with the Apple Genius Bar on Sunday, do you think I should just leave it alone now and let them look at it?

I appear to have done way more harm than good 😟

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