06 July 2008

SuperDuper saves the day ... again

Today I'm thankful for ...

... SuperDuper. This Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard upgrade sucked beyond belief. The problem: my Macbook Pro had an Apple Partition Table on it when Leopard requires a GUID Partition Table.

(I don't know if it was because this is the new 250 GB hard drive I put in recently and it may have been defaulted to the Apple Partition Table.)

So after backing up my drive to an external HDD in a USB enclosure, I went about trying to upgrade the computer. That's when it put up the error message that my computer's HDD did not have a GUID Partition Table. Well, the problem here is that to change the partitioning to the GUID way requires blanking the hard drive. Which means you have to move all the data off, then back again---to my knowledge. What complicated this is that even though SuperDuper made a bootable copy of Tiger on the external HDD, it's a USB 2.0 enclosure! And booting off of the Leopard install disk didn't let me access the USB device.

So I was in trouble yesterday after having switched my Macbook's HDD to the GUID, but my data lived off on the unreachable external drive. I ended up at Best Buy and found a Western Digital MyBook drive. When I finally got home late I was able to use the Leopard install disk to make the MyBook drive the bootable startup disk. Then running that I was able to reinstall SuperDuper and copy everything off the USB external drive back to the Macbook, and then I was able to rerun the Leopard install on the Macbook as an upgrade, not a fresh install.

Whew.

All told the time expenditure went something like this:
  • Back up the Macbook to the external USB HDD via Super Duper: 5.25 hours
  • Install Leopard on the MyBook drive: 35 minutes
  • Copy all data back from the external USB HDD to the Macbook HDD: 3.5 hours
  • Upgrade the Macbook Tiger to Leopard: 1 hour


Of course, that doesn't include the extra time required to do all the system updates.

I'm exhausted.

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