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Clayj's Excellent Snow Leopard Upgrade Adventure

clayj

clayj

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jan 14, 2005
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visiting from downstream
This is on an early 2008 MacBook Air, 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and the MacBook Air SuperDrive:

ATTEMPT #1: Insert DVD. Finder window takes a LONG time to come up. When it does, the "Install Mac OS X" icon has the wrong icon on it. Double-click it anyway, choose the disc I want to install to (my local SSD). Setup churns for a minute, says it's going to take 6 hours to complete, and then abruptly stops and advises me to carefully clean my DVD. I eject the DVD, clean it carefully (it had some smudges on it that did NOT come from me), restart the MacBook Air, and try again.

ATTEMPT #2: Insert DVD. Double-click "Install Mac OS X". It churns for a second, shows the initial window. I click Continue and the program crashes with no error message during "Finding Disks".

ATTEMPT #3: Exactly the same as Attempt #2.

ATTEMPT #4: Restart the MacBook Air AGAIN, with the DVD still in the SuperDrive. Log in as usual. The Finder window for the DVD takes a couple of minutes before it appears. Double-click "Install Mac OS X". Click Continue. Beachball appears and stays up for a couple of minutes before disappearing. Click Continue AGAIN. Beachball appears again and finally gives me the license agreement. Click Agree, and the program crashes again.

Apple: WTF? This is WORSE than when I tried to upgrade Windows XP to Vista. Windows 7, just so you know, has installed PERFECTLY every time I've done it, on several different machines.

:mad:
 
Sky Blue said:
Sounds like a faulty disc.
Click to expand...
Well, that's wonderful.

Unless this starts working pretty damn pronto, I'm pretty tempted to take this thing to the local Apple Store (I ordered it online) and return the damn thing in front of everyone. If they can't even get the damn installer to work correctly, I have no faith in the rest of it.
 
Can you not just press ALT/OPTION key when starting up your mac and choose the Snow Leopard install disc to start from ?
 
clayj said:
Well, that's wonderful.
Click to expand...

According to one of the demis, there have been reports from retailers in Australia about similar problems with faulty disks. There may be a bad batch, you may have pulled the short straw.
 
Sky Blue said:
Sounds like a faulty disc.
Click to expand...
Agree. Had this happen to me before.

Apple replaced the install CDs. Then all worked fine.

Blue Velvet said:
According to one of the demis, there have been reports from retailers in Australia about similar problems with faulty disks. There may be a bad batch, you may have pulled the short straw.
Click to expand...
Bad disk replication --> bad disk. :eek:

Wonder how extensive the problem is in Australia?
 
clayj said:
Well, that's wonderful.

Unless this starts working pretty damn pronto, I'm pretty tempted to take this thing to the local Apple Store (I ordered it online) and return the damn thing in front of everyone. If they can't even get the damn installer to work correctly, I have no faith in the rest of it.
Click to expand...

That will show em!
 
sushi said:
Wonder how extensive the problem is in Australia?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure. I believe that the NZ disks are sourced from Australia and I haven't received mine yet; I wonder whether it's been put on hold until new copies are available. Someone on an NZ forum said that their order has been delayed until 9 September.
 
Second Disc: Worse Than the First

Error received upon insertion of the disc into my MBA's SuperDrive:

Disk Insertion
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

Gods DAMN it. AND it failed in a Mac mini.
 
Not joking :). If it's a manufacturing error, the data may be intact but the disc just hard to read. If you have installed successfuly on other systems then the data is ok, so if you can use one of those machines and toast or similar to duplicate the disc, it will duplicate the data, not the manufacturing error. It may be worth a try.

Edit.... Oh just re-read your OP and it was win 7 that installed ok, still it might be worth a shot if you have the ability to duplicate it :( :eek:
 
MacRumorUser said:
^ No. If it's a manufacturing error, the data may be intact but the disc just hard to read. If you have installed successfuly on other systems then the data is ok, so if you can use one of those machines and toast or similar to duplicTe the disc, it will duplicate the data, not the manufacturing error. It may be worth a try.
Click to expand...
Except I don't have Toast, and the DVD has acted badly on every machine so far.

One thing I have noticed is smudges on my DVD, despite the fact that I have not at any point touched the surface of it. I have to wonder if Apple is using trained monkeys to stuff the DVDs into the glassine sleeves -- and why it is that their installer is so damned picky that a smudge on the DVD will cause it to fail.

At any rate, the installer is now going on my MBA. Only time will tell if it will actually succeed or fail yet again.
 
While I Wait, Some Perspective

OK, some of you already know that I used to work for Microsoft, as a tech support engineer. One of my last roles before I left was to be the Office Technical Lead for the NC support site. Basically, that meant I coordinated making sure every technical issue got investigated fully, that Knowledge Base articles got written, and that weirdo issues got taken care of. The #1 weirdo issue that I ever had to deal with was what we called the "Error 2351/2355" installation error in Office 2000 for Windows.

Basically, some customers would try to install Office 2000 from CD and the install would fail with either an "Error 2351" or an "Error 2355" midway through the installation. In some of these cases, the installation would fail in such a way that Windows itself was damaged, so it was a rather serious issue. We never encountered this problem during the Beta for Office 2000, so we didn't have any idea at first why it was happening. But after a few weeks of collecting data on the issue, one day I got a strange call from a Microsoft employee in Puerto Rico. He asked if I could start collecting CDs from affected customers. I did, and in return he sent me a box of replacement CDs to send out to customers who needed them. The replacement CDs always worked, and that's how we found out what the source of the issue was: A manufacturing error that never came up during the Beta because during the Beta, they used a different pressing facility.

So that's why I am more than a little upset about this. Apple should have done better QA on the discs that they started pressing once the Golden Master was delivered. I predict, based on my experience tonight, that there will be a lot of very upset customers who buy Snow Leopard and then find out it won't install because of dirt or smudges on the disc, or because the DVD presses aren't calibrated quite right.
 
...and is a great example of why Apple need to get into 2009 and start making available their OS releases as downloads to end-users. There's no excuse anymore for not offering this option. Steve Jobs could then crow about how freaking environmentally insanely great it is too :rolleyes:

For what it's worth clayj, I installed my copy (twice) from an external FireWire drive with no problems :) I hate optical media too :p
 
soulman901 said:
Did you get the reference?
:p
Click to expand...

I'm sure we got it.

Now what I'd like to know is in reference to creating an image of the disc, if the disc is unreadable ... nearly, then how does making an image prove successful?

It's too bad you're having problems clayj, it would seem many are though so you're not alone.
 
jessica. said:
I'm sure we got it.

Now what I'd like to know is in reference to creating an image of the disc, if the disc is unreadable ... nearly, then how does making an image prove successful?

It's too bad you're having problems clayj, it would seem many are though so you're not alone.
Click to expand...
Well, obviously if the disc is unreadable, as evidenced by the second error message I wrote in red above, making a copy isn't going to help.

But it is valid to say that if you can read the disc but can't install from it, copying it somewhere else (to a hard drive, or to another DVD) might allow you to install correctly, because how a CD or DVD is accessed during the installation process might be different from how it is accessed by the file system itself. In the 2351/2355 case I mentioned above, one workaround was to copy the contents of the CD to the hard drive, and then install from there -- in many cases, that worked.

Neither I nor anyone else should have to do that, though.
 
Not sure how you would even get a good image off the disc to begin with. It's a shame the disc is bad but I would take it back to Apple for a trade in. You may just be one of the few percents that get a bad disc and it happens for everyone, including Apple. I'll go home and try mine.
One last thing to try, use a Windows machine if you have one.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Snow_Leopard_Installation_Instructions.pdf
However it sounds like the disc is bad. So the above may be null and void.
 
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