Unlike most Apple users, I didn't make the quick jump from Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5). Mostly because I've learned the hard way not to be the first in line for upgrades. And when I read about the changes they were making, I thought "I'll wait until they work out the kinks." And then they announced Snow Leopard (10.6) and touted the $24 upgrade but, if you looked close at it, that was only from Leopard to Snow Leopard, where little was changed on the service (but much under the hood was redone). A little looking and I found that I had to get the Mac Box Set with 10.6, iWork, and the new iLife, which I wanted anyway. And lots of my tools that wanted to use only worked with Leopard on up anyway. So Snow Leopard it is.

I ordered my Box Set and waited for Amazon to ship it (it was $20 cheaper there and no taxes. Yes, I'm that cheap!). When I got it in my hands, and got ready for the upgrade . . . I did a backup first. [SuperDuper][] is my friend. Before this process was over, it became my lifesaver.

So I stuck the Snow Leopard disc in, and told it that I wanted to upgrade. The machine rebooted, the Snow Leopard install came up, and said it was starting and then . . . it quit, telling me that there was not enough room left on the drive. Which was very possible -- there was a lot of junk on that drive. So I took the disk out and rebooted, thinking I would remove some more junk and then do the upgrade. And then it happened . . .

The machine wouldn't boot.

My Mac would start up just fine, give me the Apple logo and then shut down. I put the Snow Leopard disc back in and that didn't boot either! A little research showed my assumption about it booting from the DVD drive if it couldn't boot anything else was wrong -- instead it just stops. You have to hold down "C" during the boot sequence to get it to boot from the DVD drive. I went to find my Tiger install discs and booted with that. I went to run the DiskUtility and did "Repair" but it said it couldn't. Arrgggghhhh.

I tried the DiskUtility with the Snow Leopard and it wouldn't even Repair it -- it was not a Snow Leopard hard disk!! Arrggghhhh again!

Now I had a choice. SuperDuper makes my USB hard drive bootable. [I could boot off of it][]but that doesn't solve my problem -- the boot info on the hard drive was messed up. If I booted from the USB drive and removed enough stuff to make Snow Leopard install. But, still, nothing can repair my drive. My data was safely backed up and I know that I didn't need it all anyway and, with SuperDuper, I can go and copy the files that I wanted off of it anyway. So I took a leap and erased the drive.

You read that right. I wiped the drive clean with the Snow Leopard installer and installed from scratch. Of course, the installer was more than willing to do that.

After that, things went mostly well. I copied our Music and Preferences folders over and Safari, iTunes, and Mail all saw the changes and updated their databases. The copying part took a while, but after that it was all smooth.

But I had lots of problems with MacPorts. [Emacs.app needs some manual guidence][], Python2.4 has some weirdness, and PostgreSQL/PostGIS are always a pain to install. But I got them going.

A clean install was a good thing -- it got rid of the junk and I was able to move just the files that I needed. And, thankfull, [SuperDuper][]demostrated that it's worth 10x it's $28 price tag.

So do your backup kids.