The new version of Mac OS X (Leopard) is supposed to take about an hour to install. So far it’s taken me two days.

I should add, though, that this is mostly self-imposed. The decision to do a clean install, the first I’ve ever done since moving to the Mac platform back in 2004, proved to be a greater undertaking than I expected.

The process started Friday night when I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner to do a full backup of my hard drive on my 500GB external drive; a simple enough task under most circumstances. My external drive was not formatted for Mac use though. Sure I could read and write to it, but since it was formatted for Windows, I couldn’t use it for a backup with CCC.

I decided to move everything on it to a networked drive my roommate set up recently. There was 118GB of data on that drive and, thanks to the speed of the home network, it was estimated to take 20 hours. So I sighed and let it go to it.

Yesterday morning it was down to about 11 hours before I left for work. Upon my return last night, I found it stalled. Apparently it got hung up on one file about 75% of the way through. Screw that!

Fortunately, I flexed a little plastic muscle earlier. I have a smaller external drive that wasn’t really wasn’t much use to me. It was too small to back up my Mac’s hard drive. I replaced with a drive that was twice its size. Since I want to use the 500GB drive for Time Machine, I moved all the data from that to the new drive, a 320GB model.

The data that moved was my iTunes library, so I had to consolidate it through iTunes to make sure the song links weren’t broken. They weren’t.

Finally, I was able to format the 500GB drive and use CCC to back up my Mac. It was pretty late at this point in the evening, even with the extra hour, so I decided to “set it and forget it” and went to bed.

I checked on the backup this morning after I showered. Everything looked good, so I decided I was ready for the install. Insert DVD. Reboot. Hold down C.

But I encountered hurdles. First, since I use a wireless Mighty Mouse, the Mac didn’t seem to see it right off. Before installation could even begin, Pig Pen (My iMac; I name my computers and external drives after Peanuts characters.) showed me the battery installation diagram
for the Mighty Mouse. This struck me as peculiar, but I found that switching the mouse off and back on — no need to fiddle with batteries — works just as well. Pig Pen saw the mouse.

I then encountered hurdle #2. When Pig Pen rebooted, my external drives were still connected and powered on. At the point in the installation where I need to pick which drive to install Leopard, only Marcie and Snoopy (my 320GB and 500GB drives respectively) appeared as options. I had to turn them both off, reboot, and re-do the mouse thing. I returned to the disk option dialogue and sure enough there was Pig Pen, his icon dusty as ever.

And that’s where I left it. Sure I could have let the install go on its own and I’d come home to Leopard, but when I’m putting something new on my computer, I like to keep an eye on it.

In the meantime, Pig Pen awaits.

The Marble of Doom: Mac users, how much time have you lost to the spinning rainbow pizza/beach ball/marble?

These are my links for 18 Jun:

• Daily Blog Tips - You don?t need to know much about SEO to realize links are the golden road to blog promotion.
• Fluther: Tap the Collective - A new twist on social question and answer sites.
• 25 Web Sites to Watch - The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.
• The great iPhone hunt of 2007 | CNET News.com - Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently gave free advice to a columnist asking how to get an iPhone when they go on sale: head to an AT&T store, Jobs suggested, rather than Apple’s own retail outlets.
• Mozilla exec calls Apple’s Safari plan ‘duopolistic’ - Mozilla’s chief operating officer, John Lilly, is calling Steve Jobs’ plans for building Safari’s market share “out of date” and “duopolistic.”
• Dell apologizes for remove-this-blog-post-or-else nastygram | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - A blog post at Consumerist.com offering tips on buying from Dell drew a nasty cease-and-desist letter from the company’s attorney and then, in quick succession, a chastened apology from a Dell manager.
• Microwave popcorn warning memo - Unedited memo sent out to City of Seattle employees.
• 15 Best Game Show Hosts - TIME Magazine ranks 15 best game show hosts; Bob Barker comes out on top.

These are my links for 29 May:

• Playground Fun - Worse Than Failure - “Either I missed out on a lot as a kid, or the playgrounds here in Belgium are a LOT more fun than the ones back home.”
• Anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan gives up her protest - Sheehan: My son “did indeed die for nothing”
• Real-Life Transforming Optimus Prime Costume - It’s a real costume?there’s actually a man inside?that transforms from robot to truck mode without making the wearer bend his spine in three different directions.
• Apple?s Lesson for Sony?s Stores: Just Connect - New York Times - Retail is supposed to be hard. Apple has made it seem ridiculously easy. And yet it must be harder than it appears, or why hasn?t the Windows side of the personal computer business figured it out?