The Fed-Ex guy showed up with my copy of Leopard yesterday morning, so of course, I immediately popped it into my iMac and began the upgrade. Now, as a guy who upgrades computers for a living, I should have run a backup, but I’m kinda out of extra disk space-my
important mail is on .Mac, iTunes music is on completely different computer (and mirrored nightly), and I have archives of photos and
docs which are safely backed up elsewhere on the aforementioned disks (in various forms). So I booted into the installer/ran Disk repair
(which didn’t need any repair) and Permissions repair (twice-just to be sure) and then went into the installer selecting “Archive and Install” So I’d have a nice fresh system and all my stuff put back in.

Well, about t-10 minutes, the installer balked on Epson printer drivers and gave me the instruction to run the install again. Rats! I thought. So I went back to the installer selected the Archive and Install again- but went under options and turned off all the printers except Canon and Gutenberg (and turned off the language translations-this is about a gig of files you don’t want if you use your mac in one language) And reinstalled. Of course it finished up- and rebooted….and when it booted up-
TA DA – A brand new OS, but the archive/reinstall was bungled and my typical user account was vacant. A quick looksee in the disk hierarchy showed a previous systems folder with TWO archived systems – one from the first attempt- and one from the second.
To make a long story short…I immediately made an Admin/support account- logged out of my (empty) user account/deleted it and then moved my old user folder to the new Users folder
Recreating the account it asked me if I wanted to reimport a user folder with the same name. So i did.
Indeed, this is what I wanted to do- however- I have about 30 gig of Samples and plug-ins I use regularly and these are not stored in the User account but in the Library folders. Also-none of my old apps made it. (200 +)
After logging out and back in…I went to Applications/Utilities and found the Migration Assistant. I ran that- but here’s the rub- I had
-48.6 gig of space to move the stuff to. After deleting some unnecessary folders (like the second installs’ archived system folder and a temp folder of pkgs.left nakedly outside the Previous folders) I did what I do for a lot of folks- upgrade my Library and Applications by hand.
This involves a lot of password invoking drag and drops and reading the “do you want to replace the file” notices very carefully-
you don’t want to update a Leopardy new file with a Tigery old one. I had to wait till I got home from the days work (picking up some repaired guitar amps from Stan, checking on iPhoto printing with a customer, and fixing a FW issue in windows and protools.)

I’ve done it by hand many many times for lots of folks- and myself before- but I will say that this went pretty well since there’s a lot of potential to lose key settings and files if they aren’t put back in the right place. Apple systems are very very sensitive to having the hierarchy having the right permissions for Users, Applications and Libraries talk to each other. Changing things like folder names/ Hard disk names after an install can blow up everything if you change the wrong thing (and even if you move stuff ever so slightly) so you have to be careful doing this. Folder by Folder- compare and think what is being added/replaced or

So now I have a working system- but it did take quite a chunk of time (about 1.5 hours for the install/reinstall of the OS) and then another 3-4 hours of moving testing and checking serial numbers of my pro apps to make sure they worked.
After moving some types of files it’s helpful to reboot every now and then to make sure they take correctly.

Considering I used to install Unix stuff by hand using nothing but a terminal…this is still a much better way ( i know some geeks would have resorted to the terminal to fix this bad install) then what used to pass for a failed installation routine.
Good Bad Scorecard:

Apple installer – bad- for the bad epsondriver issue- turn off unneccessary items like printers and languages you don’t need.
Reinstall – bad -for not recognizing an archived system already there. (i know why- it should have just skipped the driver install if it was bad)
Leopard in general- Good- easy to drag and drop- friendly to files moving into the “upper” hierarchies
The Dock- Bad- i turned the shelf off. I can’t get to all my apps- My Gumby app folder icon is now an alias, the fan is stupid.
Speed- Good – Leopard is snappy