An upgrade horror story

Robin is the only one in a good mood. “Macs never have problems. HAH!” This has set back by years my plan to replace her Windows desktop with a Mac. I don't think it'll ever happen now.

I upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard on my main desktop, and created a bunch of problems. Mostly annoyances with drivers and apps that didn't work anymore, but it wrecked a couple of mission critical apps: Photo Mechanic and Plural Eyes (for syncing multiple cameras in a Final Cut timeline—amazing product). I completely flummoxed the tech support at both companies for whom I was a unique case. In most contexts, being unique is almost always bad. A peek at my Console log got a “...there are quite a few issues...” response. It seemed the Tiger baggage had to go, and a wipe and clean install was my best option.

I couldn't pull a Migration Assistant without bringing over all my bad settings along for the ride, so it turned into a Windows-like upgrade. First, none of my external hard drives existed anymore. I had to grab a new driver for my eSata card. I reinstalled all my apps from disks and download backups, and pulled over data from the Tiger backup disk, which is where I started running into more problems. I couldn't import a bunch of mailboxes, and lots of folders came over with no RW permissions and the dreaded red no-go icon. When I tried to set up a Final Cut scratch disk, I found that half my disk drives had errant permissions.

An annoyance the clean wipe failed to fix: on reboot the sound reverts back to internal speakers. I lose my sound system and have to manually select it every time.

I expect I'm going to stumble upon missing plugins and problematic permissions for weeks, as I try and reinstate a regular work routine again.  

Comments

[bill emory]

what motivated you to upgrade?

[Jeff H]

Sounds like Apple really dropped the ball on QA testing of their latest OS. Your experience would be enough to make me switch OS's.

[Tom Dills]

As Bill asked, what motivated you to upgrade, especially after posting "Beware the Upgrade Rush?" I've not found a reason to upgrade from Tiger.

[Steven Alexander]

Sorry to hear your problems. Only problem I had with up-grade was I can not find firewire Epson printer but same printer is okay with UBS or ethernet. Nikon software isn't upgraded, but that is not fault of Apple.
All Adobe products feel faster and have no problems. HP office printers are fine.

[romanlily]

I have been a loyal Mac user for decades now and I've never experienced this type of problem with any upgrade. I'm sorry for all the headaches. I suspect Snow Leopard was rushed to market without proper testing. I haven't upgraded to SL yet, mostly because of what I read about your experience!

[Doug Plummer]

Part of what led me down this primrose path was how painless the upgrade was on the laptop. I wanted to get all the machines on the same OS finally, and I was seduced by the performance enhancements I'd been reading about. And I was mollified by the responses to that previous entry that CS3 was going to work after all.

I've still got my Tiger system cloned on a drive if I want to evacuate this whole debacle, and live with the problems I know.