very simple

Apparently, my Safari problems a few weeks ago were only a minor precursor to the hell that was my attempt to install Tiger.

On Saturday, fresh from re-tape measuring the entirety of my new apartment, I stopped off at Tekserve to pick up a copy of Tiger. Got home, dropped it into my disk drive, and got a disk error. Repeatedly. Gave up trying to install at about 1 in the morning.

On Sunday, I went back to Tekserve, and got a new copy. The customer service lady mentioned that I wasn’t the only one having problems (you’d think that this would cause some hesitation on my part, but nooooo, I need to have the shiny new operating system, so I must forge ahead). The new disk? Got about halfway through installing before it crapped out on my too. So I called Apple. Because at this point, I’ve got half an OS on my system. Elizabeth (who is my new best friend, by the way), said that Tiger is actually really picky, and the fact that I had problems with two disks means that it might be a problem with my computer, rather than the disk. So we walk through repairing any disk errors (there were none), and she suggests an Archive and Install, rather than upgrade. So I start that. It does get a little further, but still stops in the middle. So I call Elizabeth back (I have her direct extension at this point). Hours of attempts go by. Finally. I decide to do a clean install, because I back up everything nightly onto a LaCie drive (see? I can be smart sometimes). Still doesn’t work. At this point, my only solution is to do a clean install of Tiger, which I do. Elizabeth and I then start manually copying Tiger folders to my computer, just to see if we can find a problem, because she does agree at this point that it doesn’t look like the problem is my computer.

Well. About halfway through copying the seven thousand or so system files, we start getting file error messages. That certain miscellaneous files cannot be read. In the meantime, I had gotten on my laptop (again with the smart – two computers is pretty handy once in a while) and on the Apple discussion board there appeared to be all sorts of people having similar problems. So we agree that there must be something wrong with the batch.

She’s sending me a new copy (from a different batch, naturally), and they’re going to try and figure out what’s wrong. She thought I was the most awesome customer ever, both because of my patience through the whole process, and my willingness to experiment. And I swear I could hear her doing the dance of joy when I mentioned my rigorous backup routine. Because apparently a lot of customers don’t do that sort of thing…

But I swear. If it weren’t for the fact that Microsoft sucks rotten eggs, and the fact that Apple does have awesome customer service, I’d have thrown my iMac out the window at this point. Because how do you ship an entire batch of corrupt disks on a major launch release? Quality control? something?

I’ve been reinstalling the oodles of software that I had on my computer, and it’s going to take me at least a few more days to get everything up and running…I didn’t lose too much that I can see so far. The biggest loss that I’ve found so far is the contents of my delicious library. Which sucks because I manually entered all the information…

The plus side? My computer does seem to be running a heck of a lot faster…I guess that’s what happens when you completely wipe it of three years worth of scattered files…

Stay tuned for my further attempts…

Tags: apple, bitching, technology