Leopard install corrupted entire file system!?

[volvoben]

Call me an enormous idiot for buying leopard and installing it on the first possible day, but I just bought myself a 1-way ticket to the doghouse with the girlfriend by totally screwing her CD iMac...

put leopard disc in, restarted, didn't see any options about upgrade/archive & install etc, but i figured that'd come later, it verified the dvd for consistency, then just as it started 'installing' it gave a 'an error has occurred, to try again please restart...' or something similar. I thought 'ah crap, better go google this and be sure i'm not missing something important', but when it restarted the question mark folder popped up for a second, then the apple on the gray screen as if all was well for 30 seconds, then the machine shut itself off. great, i can already see her face. "no no honey, if you give me the extra $70 for the family pack you can have this cool reflecto-dock!!!". "no", she said "it works the way it is, don't f*$& with it". But no, i am mr. 'needs to f with it', and oh lord, i'm doomed.

so i threw in the original tiger dvd hoping to run disk utility, but it didn't even see the HDD!!! the leopard dvd did see the hdd, but claimed it needed to be formatted. disk utility found "keys out of order", which apparently can only be fixed with disk warrior and luck.

What do I do?!?! i really don't feel like dropping $100 for disk warrior, but i haven't backed up her photos and work documents since about a month ago, and i will literally be sleeping outside in my car if i lost all of it...$100 sounds great compared to that, but why the flying f&$*(&$#*( did leopard f*$#($#(* up so badly??!?!?

the same disk installed fine on my work computer (or at least it didn't go nucking futs and screw my file system).

busy time for these questions, i know, but i'm in serious need here, if she tries to turn on her computer and sees what happens...well, let's just say i'll slip out the door and run as fast as possible while covering my ears so i won't hear the screams...

 

[jbardi]

Not many choices..

It sounds to me like the DVD started a clean install rather than an upgrade.

The whole thing is kind of fishy, because first you say it didn't give you the options of which type of install, so you said you figured it would ask you later so you continued on, then you say the same DVD worked perfectly on your work machine, which makes me think to myself that either A) You installed on your work machine first, so you would have KNOWN that the 3 install options should have been presented to you at the beginning so I don't know how you could have suddenly thought it would ask you later down the line during the install on your girlfriends machine, or B) You installed on your work machine AFTER you screwed up your girlfriend's machine, so you are a person who thinks the DVD is screwed, so your logical response is to use the same DVD on your work machine and hope for the best.

You see where I'm going here? Just sounds kind of fishy. Maybe you didn't back up and accidentally chose the Clean Install, not realizing you were going to wipe the drive and you are embarrassed. Possible?

In any event, I think your sleeping in the car, because if Tiger can't see the drive, it most likely got screwed up with the Leopard install, possibly because you did not verify the drive and repair permissions with Disk Utility before starting the install. If there were errors on the drive, then that would very likely hose the install with the error message you received, so at this point, you may have a half dead drive that could have been wiped out by Leopard, or you could have some date recoverable, but if you did not choose the Archive and Install option, that chance is unlikely. The only way to find out is to purchase Disk Warrior, but it may not be able to even see the drive as mac format.

Bottom line... when dealing with your personal files, backup, backup, backup, and if you lose them, you have only yourself to blame... but to jump in with both feet and blast your girlfriends irreplaceable property (pictures, documents, etc) is plain irresponsible. I'd like to help you out, but I have no magic answers for you, but even if I did, I hate to say it, but part of me would not want to tell you, because frankly I think you deserve what ever punishment your girlfriend gives you!

 

[sedarby]

It sounds to me like the DVD started a clean install rather than an upgrade.

The whole thing is kind of fishy, because first you say it didn't give you the options of which type of install, so you said you figured it would ask you later so you continued on, then you say the same DVD worked perfectly on your work machine, which makes me think to myself that either A) You installed on your work machine first, so you would have KNOWN that the 3 install options should have been presented to you at the beginning so I don't know how you could have suddenly thought it would ask you later down the line during the install on your girlfriends machine, or B) You installed on your work machine AFTER you screwed up your girlfriend's machine, so you are a person who thinks the DVD is screwed, so your logical response is to use the same DVD on your work machine and hope for the best.

You see where I'm going here? Just sounds kind of fishy. Maybe you didn't back up and accidentally chose the Clean Install, not realizing you were going to wipe the drive and you are embarrassed. Possible?

In any event, I think your sleeping in the car, because if Tiger can't see the drive, it most likely got screwed up with the Leopard install, possibly because you did not verify the drive and repair permissions with Disk Utility before starting the install. If there were errors on the drive, then that would very likely hose the install with the error message you received, so at this point, you may have a half dead drive that could have been wiped out by Leopard, or you could have some date recoverable, but if you did not choose the Archive and Install option, that chance is unlikely. The only way to find out is to purchase Disk Warrior, but it may not be able to even see the drive as mac format.

Bottom line... when dealing with your personal files, backup, backup, backup, and if you lose them, you have only yourself to blame... but to jump in with both feet and blast your girlfriends irreplaceable property (pictures, documents, etc) is plain irresponsible. I'd like to help you out, but I have no magic answers for you, but even if I did, I hate to say it, but part of me would not want to tell you, because frankly I think you deserve what ever punishment your girlfriend gives you!

No need to be rude to the poor dude.

Get Disk Warrior and hope it helps. I did this a long time ago to my girlfriends (now wife) computer. Dog house? Oh yes, but she did finally kind of get over it (she hasn't mentioned it in the last 3 or 4 years). In my case it was a PC and a copy of SCO Unix. Oy, what a mess. I feel for you bro but just take your medicine and work through it.

 

[Gojulas895]

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[me354]

Call me an enormous idiot for buying leopard and installing it on the first possible day, but I just bought myself a 1-way ticket to the doghouse with the girlfriend by totally screwing her CD iMac...

put leopard disc in, restarted, didn't see any options about upgrade/archive & install etc, but i figured that'd come later, it verified the dvd for consistency, then just as it started 'installing' it gave a 'an error has occurred, to try again please restart...' or something similar. I thought 'ah crap, better go google this and be sure i'm not missing something important', but when it restarted the question mark folder popped up for a second, then the apple on the gray screen as if all was well for 30 seconds, then the machine shut itself off. great, i can already see her face. "no no honey, if you give me the extra $70 for the family pack you can have this cool reflecto-dock!!!". "no", she said "it works the way it is, don't f*$& with it". But no, i am mr. 'needs to f with it', and oh lord, i'm doomed.

so i threw in the original tiger dvd hoping to run disk utility, but it didn't even see the HDD!!! the leopard dvd did see the hdd, but claimed it needed to be formatted. disk utility found "keys out of order", which apparently can only be fixed with disk warrior and luck.

What do I do?!?! i really don't feel like dropping $100 for disk warrior, but i haven't backed up her photos and work documents since about a month ago, and i will literally be sleeping outside in my car if i lost all of it...$100 sounds great compared to that, but why the flying f&$*(&$#*( did leopard f*$#($#(* up so badly??!?!?

the same disk installed fine on my work computer (or at least it didn't go nucking futs and screw my file system).

busy time for these questions, i know, but i'm in serious need here, if she tries to turn on her computer and sees what happens...well, let's just say i'll slip out the door and run as fast as possible while covering my ears so i won't hear the screams...

nearly the same exact thing just happened with me, my macbook is completely ****ed, its doing that reboot thing and refuses to start all the way up even after i got the leapord disk out. When i tried restarting the install process it said i would have to wipe out my hard drive in order to continue

any suggestions on this would be much appreciated

 

[prodmod]

Try this!

Possible solution, since a very similar thing happened to me.

I rebooted after a hung leopard install, and found myself with a question mark.

Keep in mind that if you are going from a previous version of OS X to Leopard, then 100% of the time, the installer will treat this as an upgrade automagically (yes, I used that phrase) so if you didn't go out of your way to select a fresh install on an erased hard drive, chances are, your system files are just corrupt which is fine because the way that OS X separates user data and essential system files is ingenious - it keeps it safe in light of impending system file disaster!

Here's a possible solution -

restart the installer, make sure you have about an hour, when you get to the point of selecting the drive to install Leopard on, there's a little options button. Click that and choose the option to Archive and Install so it takes the user data and separates it out in an archive folder while a fresh base system is reinstalled.

This worked fine for me after I restarted the installer.

Again, if you didn't go out of your way to select a fresh install, chances are your data is fine, due to the sheer foresight of Apple's engineers.

Because they know stuff gets screwed up sometimes.

Good luck!

Archive and Install!!

 

[volvoben]

well, here's the quasi-resolution for those interested:

Girlfriend was very understanding, although I could tell that if she lost the last week's work she'd be less happy. She's responsible for her own backing up, she has a 500g drive in my server, but getting her to remember and mounting the drive in tiger aren't always easy (leopard is much much easier in this regard, mounting shares is finally slick). Anyway, I just whipped out the perfectly leopardized macbook from work, target disked the imac (it popped up telling me the volume was beyond repair but i could retrieve my files before reformatting), ran diskwarrior which luckily IT had at work (oddly the imac wouldn't boot into the diskwarrior boot disk...makes me wonder if the optical drive is dirty or something...), it rebuilt the directory, and the imac is back on tiger looking exactly as it was. I still have no idea what went wrong or why it errored out almost immediately. I'm leaving it up to her whether she wants to try again, i suggested a clean install because she has so much junk on there, loads of old programs, a bunch of cleardock type mods, video game emulators, 832 widgets etc.

and yes, i backed up everything to my server as soon as it was back in action; time machine would be absolutely perfect for her, too bad it won't work with a network share on my server...

thanks for the responses, there's nothing 'fishy' going on, i somehow screwed up my leopard installation. the boys in IT were very curious about leopard so they installed it on my macbook for me (i own the computer but use it at work, leopard shipped to work so i didn't have to f around with signing for stuff). despite owning and using macs for a while now, i largely started when tiger was brand new and haven't installed nor upgraded a single machine, so i had no idea you had to click options or it would assume you wanted to upgrade.

In fresh OSX news my sister bought a macbook with the drop-in dvd but didn't install leopard assuming it was on there already. she called and asked where time machine was, took me a good 5 minutes of thinking before i realized she hadn't installed leopard. I was planning on helping her upgrade over the phone, but i might wait for her 14 days to be up in case these rumors of MB updates are true.