Snow Leopard Install Knightmare

Well, it happened. On Friday of last week I ran out to the Apple store and purchased Snow Leopard. More specifically, I purchased the Snow Leopard Box Set with iLife '09 and iWork '09. That was one lucky purchase but more on that later.

After a bite to eat I introduced my MacBook Pro to the Snow Leopard disk. They seemed to get along well for the first minute or two. Then the Snow Leopard installation routine asked me where it should install Snow Leopard. There is only one problem. NONE of my disks including the default "Macintosh HD" were identified as "bootable" and thus Snow Leopard woudn't install. No options, no nothin'. I then went to my favorite troubleshooting tool - Google. I discovered that others were having the same problem but there was no definitive solution. Some people said it had to do with PGP Desktop so I removed PGP Desktop. That didn't work. Some said there was a backup file in the root directory of the hard drive that would cause the problem but that file didn't exist. I tried booting from the install disk. Fail! So what's next? Call Apple.

I got tech support on the line and told them what was going on and what I did. They politely asked me if they could put me on hold and then did so. They came back and had me boot from the install disk and attempt to repair the disk volume. No problems were detected (I had already checked but humored them nonetheless). They put me on hold again and came back with the secret, fine-print, little known fact. The upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard works for computers that had Leopard originally installed but not for computers that originally had Tiger. I was told that I needed to buy the full version and not the upgrade. I asked how much that would cost. I then mentioned that I was a little upset as I had already dropped $170 on the "box set". At this time I was somewhat relieved as we had found the solution. At the same time I was a little ticked off because I was going to have to drop even more money on this upgrade. The tech support guy heard me mention the box set and put me on hold again. It turns out that the box set is the full version and thus I had the right product and it still wouldn't install. The brought in another tech support guy to help. This one was a product specialist.

We did another troubleshooting dance, going round and round. We tried to install Leopard on top of Leopard with no success. OK, so it's not a Snow Leopard problem but something wrong with my laptop. We checked the partition information and found all was as it should be. We checked a few other settings associated with the disk and still found no problems. What was the final option? We had to re-partition the hard drive. Yep, that's right. We blew out the whole thing and installed from scratch. I guess it's a good thing that I purchased the "box set".

After a clean install I was able to use my Time Machine backups (completed earlier in the day) to restore my profile, applications, etc. After using the Mac for a couple of days now, everything seems to be working well. I'm still figuring out all the in's and out's of the new Exchange integration but otherwise, everything is working.

Total time to install Snow Leopard including restoring from Time Machine and installing iWork and iLife upgrades - about 6 hours.