MY JOURNEY TO LEOPARD

So I got my copy of Mac OS X Leopard on the 7th... but I didn’t run right home and install it because I wanted to make sure I did a full backup. The thing is I have a 500GB boot drive and all my external firewire drives are 250GB are less.

So I took two of my LaCie 250GB drives and used disk utility to stripe them together to create a 500GB RAID... I’m not crazy about creating a RAID with external drives, but it’s the only way to accommodate all the data I have collected over the years. So I set my cloning utility - SuperDuper - to do a full backup... but I am getting like 4.8MB/s thoughtput and can’t figure out why... turns out to be going through a firewire hub, which is a big no-no for a backup device. Reroute to a my last open firewire port and restart the backup.

At first I’m getting well over 200MB/s... cool, maybe I’ll get this done and be able to possibly begin the install of Leopard. Then about 50GB in it starts to slow down to a crawl... stop, run DiskWarrior, it turns out to be a corrupt video podcast that caused the backup to choke... reboot, delete that file and restart the backup. At this point it’s late... so I let it run overnight.

I check it in the morning and ti’s only 60% complete... I tell me daughter Taylor to please not use my computer while I was at work because I didn’t want anything to disrupt the backup. Of course she doesn’t listen to me and asks my wife if she can use it, knowing that my wife has no idea why I told her why she couldn’t use it. GRRR.

I come home - G5 is frozen... force reboot... I get the dreaded racing fan syndrome (G5 owners know it well), try force rebooting 3 more times still know luck... run DiskWarrior, disk has all sorts of errors, so While I am in this mode I check the block size of my backup drive and by boot drive and it appears to be close to identical so I figure, ok let’s just boot from the Leopard DVD and do it... and I am glad to say it worked without any trouble.

Well, not completely worry free... the install process sat at “less than a minute” for well over 20 minutes... so I went to bed and game back to it in the morning and it was dutifully waiting for me at the Leopard login screen.

My first impressions to come...