10.3: Fix broken Panther with Jaguar

Nov 13, '03 08:58:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Excitedly my employer and I waited for Panther to arrive from Apple. Before I undertook to install it on her "mission critical" TiBook 500 (first generation), I played guinea pig and began the upgrade on my Pismo 400. Oddly the trackpad disappeared until a full shutdown and reboot, but after that all seemed well.

Next came the TiBook. I chose to follow the "Upgrade" path rather than "archive and install" mainly because of the several third-party enhancements (ASM, Default Folder X, Window Shade) we'd installed to fill some gaps in Jaguar. After watching the new blue candy cane spin for about two hours, the install was finally over. To my horror after reboot, the Setup Application crashed, followed by the Finder and every other thing I tried to launch. Even a "safe boot" by holding the shift key produced the same results. I suspected some deviant startup app, but without being able to so much as open a Terminal, I was lost. I re-installed, this time selecting "archive and install," but to no avail, the same thing happened.

Out of desperation, I resorted to installing 10.2, opting to archive. Happily after install I was greeted with a fully functional system, with all third party "enhancements" absent from the control panel. Another two hours and she was updated to Panther and all was well. Previous user files were safely archived and easily dragged to her newly created Home directory. So the moral is -- don't throw out your 10.2 CD-ROMs yet, especially if you suspect unruly startup or system enhancements are crashing your Panther fun.

[robg adds: I'll use this hint for a quick comment on my install preferences: If possible, I do an "erase and install" any time I can for a major upgrade like this. Yes, it's substantially more work, and yes, you need to be very careful that you have a complete and functional backup available before proceeding. But in the end, you wind up with a system that's devoid of any carryovers that might cause problems in the new OS. If you have a partitioned drive, this is also substantially easier -- I keep 95% of my apps on an Applications partition, so a major upgrade doesn't mean I also have to reinstall all my apps, too. I just copy over key prefernce folders and reinstall those apps that just insist on living in /Applications, and I'm good to go.]

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