I decided it was about time for me to go ahead and get Snow Leopard installed on my Mac. I have been running Tiger 10.4 for years and never bothered to upgrade, because, quite frankly, it ran like a dream. But, with more and more programs only running on Leopard now, I felt it was time to make that leap.
Installation on my MacBook laptop went great. Smooth as silk. So I figured it would do the same on my main computer, a 20 inch iMac. Hmmm. Guess what? Nope! In the process of installing the new operating system it killed my hard drive! I'm not sure what went wrong, but of course, wouldn't you know it, I did the cardinal sin of not backing up before I began the install. Wow.
Disk Warrior to the rescue. I have used Disk Warrior in the past to resurrect dead USB externals, but never had to use it on a main hard drive before. Set that puppy to working, to try and rebuild a directory. Four and a half hours later, it tells me it isn't able to rebuild my directory, the disk is too far gone! Luckily I had run it in "scavenge" mode and it did resurrect almost all of my important files that I had stupidly not backed up. Another five hours later and I had copied them on to an external hard drive for safekeeping, and in case I ever needed them again.
Luckily all of my customer files, business documents, and photographs are stored on external drives (a total of six different ones), so I didn't lose the REALLY important stuff. Just the stuff that makes it a pain to have to redownload and install again. :( Programs, drivers, and the like.
I ended up having to wipe my hard drive clean and start fresh, with a fresh install of my new operating system. It was a pain, it had me down for a day and a half, but all is up and running now! And did it all while super sick with a killer migraine! I was running between computer and the bed, catching hour naps here and there, all day during the fiasco. So far though, after all is said and done, it runs like a dream. While I wish I didn't experience the mess of all that, I am glad to have the new operating system on my computer. Everything is running faster, sleeker and better. I am sure a new clean hard drive helps!
Lesson learned though! Never again will I attempt a new system install, or even upgrade, again without a fresh backup of my drive. As long as I have been using Macs (since 1988), you would think I would know better! So here I am, over 36 hours later, up and running and posting. Yeah!
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