Apple’s MacOS X 10.5 “Leopard” has been out a while now, and I hear about more and more people hitting an installation snag that causes them a lot of grief.

You boot up the Leopard DVD-ROM, start walking through the install process and when it gets to the dialog asking where to install it, there’s nothing. No disk partitions show up at all.

I’ve encountered this on several computers so far. I can’t tell you exactly what causes it. I’ve seen it on both Intel and PowerPC machines.

We tried all the obvious things: reset the PRAM, repair the target disk, repair permissions on the target disk… no luck.

The solution is simple:

walk away from your computer for 20 to 30 minutes – go get a snack, watch a TV show, have sex, read a book for a while. Go outside! Just ignore your computer for a while; come back, and most likely you’ll find that your hard drive has mysteriously shown up and you can proceed with the install.

Speculation is that there’s some internal consistency check that the Leopard installer is silently doing which is causing the delay. I would really like to be able to report on what exactly this check is so that I could more easily believe it, but I still haven’t seen a more detailed explanation. I’d speculate that it’s also possible that there’s a bug being exercised in the installer’s kernel or other logic when it tries to mount the disk, something which makes it take a very long time. I just don’t know for sure.

But if you hit this problem, don’t worry about the PRAM or getting out Disk Warrior or repairing permissions… just let your Mac relax for a while and come back later.

Amazon, by the way, still has a $20 discount on the single license version of Leopard, and a $30 discount on the five license version of Leopard.
[tags]leopard, macos x 10.5, hang, install, dvdrom, hard drive, failure[/tags]

|  Print This Post