Mac OS X Leopard Installer Bug

Posted by knorby on January 7, 2008 under Apple, IT, personal, uchicago | Be the First to Comment

I suppose this isn’t a bug per say, but I did file a bug report about it today, because it seems like a glaring problem. Anyway, here is the problem in story form.

I have been helping install Leopard on many of the maclab’s computers recently, where we have both intel machines and G5s. Aside from some of the differences in architecture, there are differences between the two. For one, the setup utility doesn’t play the setup video on the G5s. I really enjoy the video for some reason, but it is getting old, but it looks like I won’t be watching it for a while as the intels are all setup. Anyway, as we were installing, we ran into the same basic problem on many of the machines. At the screen to select a partition to upgrade, or any drive for that matter, nothing appeared. Although it came up on a few intel machines, I was able to get it to work by going into disk utility and attempting to erase the drive. An error came up that said the resource was busy, and when I exited, the drive was there. When I tried this trick on the G5s, I got the same error but no results. On some machines, I played around in disk utility and terminal for a while, and eventually something came up. It seemed like some dark voodoo was going on. I was getting about half the G5s to install, and most of the time, I had do play around for a while. Fortunately, the installer has a terminal, so if you think to do so, you can get some insight as to what is going on. The installer runs fsck_hfs with the -y option set, which has it repair any problem found on the partition. It came up on a few of the intels, because the computers just had more use for whatever reason, but they were still new, so the fixes were fast. The G5s have had a lot more use, so the partitions are far more likely to need repairs. Once we realized the problem, we could just periodically run ps aux to see when it had finished. There might be some absurd bit of shell script using something like ps aux|grep fsck_hfs|grep -v grep (no pgrep on the install disk) and some other junk, but there is little point. I am not calling into question Apple’s wisdom for making partition repairs at the installer—that makes sense—the problem is that the installer never really indicates what is going on. It seems like such as easy find to me after we got it, but I doubt the average Apple customer. Apple is supposed to be the user-friendly company that makes everything fun and easy. They are the guys who play the “doo doo doo” song after the install! It seems they could at least say what is going on with the drive. Did they just not test the installer? I am sure plenty of people who upgrade from tiger will need to do some disk repair. Granted, most people don’t run something like radmind every night or use their machine as intensely as it gets used in a lab, but I am sure this problem will crop up somewhere. Really, the strange thing was that we didn’t find anything on mac forums or anything like that. Maybe we are just bad searchers…

Although I haven’t confirmed this, I believe you have to open one of the other programs like disk utility or terminal in order to refresh the installer, so it can see the disk after the install. I think the installer on ubuntu is more user-friendly then the leopard one, at least judging off this problem. As I said, I ended up filing a bug report. It seemed like they try pretty hard to limit bug report filers to mac techs. I had to login to my ADC account, and they required a far more technical report than most. Such is Apple.

Update: I was doing a tiger install today, and I noticed that Apple included a message in the install. Seems like a bug to me….