Help! After a botched Leopard install attempt, my PB is toast!

[SuperChuck]

Here's what happened:

My 12" Powerbook has a bum DVD-ROM drive, but I wanted to upgrade the OS from Tiger to Leopard. I tried booting up in Target Disk mode, but for whatever reason, neither my Leopard-running iMac G5, nor my Leopard-running Intel iMac would mount the disk.

I decided to get clever and boot my Intel iMac in Target Disk mode with the installation DVD in its drive. This mounted right up on my PB. I opened the installer and put in my password when prompted to restart to begin installation.

My PB restarted, showed the gray Apple screen, and then the install CD ejected itself from the Intel iMac. I inserted it again. It ejected itself again. I decided to wait and see what would happen. Nothing happened. Just the gray screen and the gray spinning thingy.

After a long wait, I decided to just reboot. I got the scary folder with a question mark, followed almost immediately by the folder with the finder icon in it, then the gray Apple screen. It sat there for a long while, then just turned itself off.

I tried again. No dice. I tried booting up while holding option. I selected my hard drive, which showed up just fine, and then got the grey screen with logo, the pause, and then the computer turned off.

I booted up while holding shift. Once again, I got the ? folder, then the finder icon folder, then the grey Apple screen, then the computer shut down.

I booted up in single user mode. Typed fsck -fy and then got this error: disk0s3: I/O error.

I booted back into Target disk mode hoping that my disk utility on the Intel iMac would be able to set things straight. Although the disk still didn't mount, Disk Utility saw it there, but verify disk and repair disk were grayed out when I selected it.

I can't bear to lose this little computer. It seems crazy that all this could happen from simply attempting an OS upgrade! The computer was just fine before. Surely there must be a way to fix this. Please, please - if you have any suggestions - let me know.

Thanks in advance!

Rob

 

[SuperChuck]

Well, I found an ancient, 2.5 year-old backup of my poor Powerbook on one of my hard drives. Luckily, I was able to boot up with that and restore it. The Powerbook works fine now, but over two years of stuff is gone. Most of the important things were on my desktop, but some stuff is now gone forever. Really important things like family photos.

Let this be yet another lesson - always maintain a backup. Especially before attempting an upgrade.

The irony is that the main reason I wanted the upgrade was to use Time Machine.

 

[G-Com]

Sorry to hear that.

I, too, lost stuff by not backing up.

 

[Dmac77]

that really sucks man. You just scarred me I 'm going to install tiger on my "new" ibook g3 on Monday. I don't know if I am going to do it now being that I don't have any of the original backup disks. Yikes

 

[theLimit]

I've lost precious memories by not having a backup as well. Lesson learned.

 

[DREN]

Help! After a botched Leopard install

My friend installed leopard after using tiger with no problems. He had simular problems with his Mac as you guys had. He is running on a 12 month old imac. After installing leopard is just trashed his Mac.

If you have bought Leopard from Mac and it trashes your Comp you can take it into your local Mac shop and have them look at it. Somethings to remember with Mac though. If your Mac is under warranty or you have apple care, your warranty is BOMB PROOF. If you have neither of these you might have to pay to have your Mac looked at.

Back to my friend. I rang my local Mac store up and told them Leopard had trashed the Mac. the guy on the end of the phone made an appointment there and then for us to take the mac to the Apple store. Its worth noting here as well that the Mac Tech Guy seemed to know the problem with this Mac before it had even been powered up. He wasn't interested in the Leopard disk we had taken in, which seemed odd.

After he powered it up and got all the crap of it not booting up properly and the spinning icon he did something he wouldn't tell us about and he got all my info back. But wait after getting all my info back he then said are there any files you don't need as I'm going to have to reinstall Leopard and not the version you have got. So even though my Mac had its stuff back it was going to get wiped anyway.

All the files I wanted were saved somewhere on my Mac and he then wiped it clean and installed Leopard. The guy was a genius without doubt and without making a hard copy of my files he found them and put my Mac back simular to what it was before installing Leopard.

The bad points are huge about this problem of installing Leopard and some of them you guys know about. The Mach Tech Guy spent over 3 hours of putting my Mac back together. I spent the nexrt day putting my other applications back on as all my application that were not Mac got wiped out and I had to re install all of them.

the Mac Guy did say this about Leopard. If you don't have enough RAM on your Mac, leopard will trash the life out of it. He went on to say no RAM no Mac, even if you put a new RAM card in after you have installed Leopard. You have to have enough RAM before you install Leopard. This seemed to be one of the Problems with my friends Mac. He didn't have enough RAM and it trashed his Mac. It works rock solid again now and Leopard seems to be brilliant.

My advice with what I have seen with my friends Mac and others in the Mac shop is this. If you have it in warranty, or Apple Care get the Mac Guys to check it out before you install leopard. if you don't have any of these put your hand in your pocket and pay the Mac Guys to look at your Mac first. Seriously it can save a lot of $£'s.

Like I said above the Mac Guy did find all my data which was a relief so it might be worth asking a pro at the Mac Shop to take a look at your Mac. Oh and ffs make copies of your files and photos it saves breaking your heart and mind.