At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Reports are emerging of faulty Snow Leopard install discs, yet the
Apple support line's only advice is to go back to the store - which has
most likely sold out.
Despite several attempts, the Snow Leopard install disc
I bought today refuses to install on my MacBook - claiming the disc is
scratched or dirty. When I first inserted the disc nothing happened,
Leopard didn't recognise there was a disc in the drive and even refused
to eject it. I guess it's lucky Snow Leopard makes ejecting discs more
reliable, too bad I can't install it.
Next I tried rebooting, holding C to boot from install disc. Everything
seemed to go well and I told it to install to a spare partition,
preserving the Leopard installation so I can run some comparison tests.
The install disc seemed happy with this arrangement and I've seen other
people confirm that the Snow Leopard disc will let you do a clean
install and not just an upgrade from Leopard. It proceeded to install
Snow Leopard on the spare partition, but gave up after a few minutes
claiming "Install failed: the installer could not copy the necessary
support files".
I
rebooted again into Leopard and this time it could see the install disc
so I ran the installer. Everything seemed to go fine, but then the
remaining time jumped from 35 minutes to 54 minutes and the disc began
to start and stop spinning. Then it abandoned the install with the
error message; "There is a problem reading the Mac OS X Install DVD.
Carefully clean the disc and try again."
Close inspection of the disc revealed no marks, it was fresh out of the
packaging, so I tried again with the same result. Leopard's Disk
Utility says the disc is fine but a few more attempts saw it fail again
and again. As a test I even backup up Leopard using SuperDuper and then
tried to upgrade Leopard to Snow Leopard, but the install still failed.
I decided the disc must be faulty and put in a call to the Apple
support line.
After
10 minutes on hold I explained my situation and the help desk agent
agreed the disc seemed faulty. He also confirmed that I wasn't the
first person he'd spoken to today with a faulty disc. A quick Google
search reveals other people have had the same problem -
although this disc fault is confirmed by the Disk Utility.
According
to the help desk agent, Apple is completely out of stock of Snow
Leopard discs and he had no idea when more will be in stock. His only
advice was to call the store where I bought the disc. I did this, just
before closing time on Friday, and was told new stock wasn't expected
until at least Wednesday.
If you find yourself with a faulty Snow Leopard install disc, you could be in for a long wait.
Michelle Thomas
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