Of Stuffing and Software

Today, right smack in the middle of making 5 batches of stuffing, I had the brilliant idea to install new software on my MacBook Pro. (You can already tell how this one is going to go, can't you?) You see, not only don't I have Snow Leopard, I don't even have Leopard! Yes, I'm still running Tiger, if you can believe it! There wasn't really anything about Leopard that made me think it was worth the extra cash, but lately I've been admiring the Time Machine automatic backup system, and there have been a couple of software upgrades I couldn't take advantage of because I was still running 10.4. So a friend happened to have an extra copy of his Leopard disk, and I popped it in.

The next thing I knew, the whole screen went black, which was more than a little scary. But then I saw that it was really only about 99% black. With my trusty flashlight (really!), I could just make out enough of the dialog box to quit and restart. I did some Googling and quickly found out that this weird glitch can be avoided by adjusting the screen brightness to maximum before installing, and also by disabling the Energy Saver. So I started again.

This time I could see just what I was doing, but when I went to do the installation, it said that I couldn't for some reason. So I tried to restart again, and that's when my troubles began. Every time I tried to start it up, it would power itself off. I even tried to reboot from my old Tiger disks, but no luck.

I felt like I was going to throw up. Luckily I had just backed up to an external hard drive about a week ago—very luckily, because I rarely remember to do that at all—so I would have lost only a few photos and emails and such. I was more concerned that I had somehow cooked the whole machine and was suddenly going to find myself looking down the barrel of a big purchase at a bad time for big purchases.

I quickly called Scott, who walked me through some possible fixes, but nothing worked. His verdict (and I quote): "You're fucked." Get me my smelling salts!

I booted up the old iMac and made an immediate appointment at the Genius Bar. I dashed over to the dreaded mall, where Derek talked me down off the ledge—and then managed to get my Mac up and running again! I don't know what kind of special magic genius trickery he used, but I was mighty impressed. He said that if I wanted to leave it there, he'd install Leopard for me and I could come back for it in an hour, but I figured I'd had enough excitement for one day—and those pans of stuffing weren't putting themselves in the oven in my absence either. I also want to do a complete backup before I let that disk anywhere near my baby again. I'll go in next week, maybe, and see if he can set me up.

So, Mac and I are back together again–and I've got 5 batches of stuffing in the fridge, ready to be reheated on Thursday.

Comments

[Margaret]

Gee, that sounds like Windows... :)

[scott]

Glad to offer my expert advice any time! Heh. I said that to a number of people today, too. Made a habit of it.

[amy]

My stomach hurts just reading about this. I hate, hate, hate doing software upgrades on my mac or phone for this very reason. I remember doing it once on my old mac and when I re-booted, the sad face came up. Worst Sight Ever.