I am upgrading my main axe, my MacBook Pro, to Leopard right now. I tried upgrading a couple months ago but got stopped because the DVD drive on my MBP is fussy and wouldn't read the Leopard Install disk. That slowed me down long enough to realize I had better wait a while before I upgrade my primary computer.
I first upgraded my backup notebook my MacBook on October 27. Then on December 2, when I bought my 24" iMac, I used the included Leopard disk to upgrade it.
Things have worked fairly well on those machines and I really enjoy Leopard but I was still having some conflicts running IMAP email with some machines on Leopard and some on Tiger. I had planned to upgrade my MBP at Christmas but didn't do it. Still kind of hesitant.
Yesterday, New Years, I was thinking, let's do it. And bought online the Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard ebook. I really recommend this to anyone who hasn't upgraded to Leopard but wants to. I also bought Take Control of Customizing Leopard. The 2 ebooks together were $15. Seemed a small price to pay if it saves me some hassle or problems in the installation.
After going through the Upgrading ebook, I decided to use Erase and Install. That meant I needed 2 full bootable clones of my MBP before I could upgrade. I ran SuperDuper twice and created two clones on two hard drives. That felt good.
Today and followed the upgraders guide further and deactivated startup items, made a smartupdate to update one of my clones and was set to go. I also did a verify on my MBP drive which came up good in Tiger.
I then put the Leopard DVD in my iMac and shutdown my MBP. Then I connected the MBP to my iMac via a firewire cable and shutdown the MBP. Then I powered up the MBP with the T key held down to put it into firewire diskmode. Then back to my iMac and ran the Leopard installer. The MBP drive showed up.
I then went into the Disk Utilities available from the startup disk and verified the MBP drive. It almost finished but then bombed out. I then tried again and after a 2nd time the repairs all took and I had a clean bill of health from Leopard's Disk Utilities. That was also a reassuring thing. Not sure this was necessary at all since I planned to do an Erase and Install, but better safe than sorry I thought.
I went ahead then and used the Options button to select Erase & Install and continued and selected Customize and deleted extra translations (saving 1.9 gigs) but kept foreign fonts since Joes said the extra characters those fonts have might come in handy. I also chose to install the X-11 tools because those sometimes come in handy when you try to do command line kinds of things.
I'm about 15 minutes into the upgrade and it's telling me I have 26 minutes to go.
I won't be done then because I will have to do a Leopard-assisted transfer from my most recent clone of the MBP to get my applications, settings and data back on my fresh install of Leopard. I like the Erase and Install because you get a from scratch install and still don't have to install all our applications from scratch or even copy your data. I'm expecting that it will take 2-4 hours to transfer everything.
Luckily, my little Blackbook is available because both my iMac and MBP are tied up doing all this stuff. I'll let you know any further developments.
Update 7:22 pm. All done with the installation. Had to unplug my MBP in order to get it out of firewire drive mode. Also shut down my iMac to get it out of the mode of welcoming me to Leopard after it restarted itself when my Leopard install was done. But, all was well when I plugged in my external drive with the MBP clone on it and restarted my MBP. As soon as the MBP started up, I got the festive Leopard welcome and was offerred the option to transfer settings and such from another computer. I chose other volume and right now the transfer is going and says 1 hour and 36 minutes remaining.
Update 11:52 pm. The transfer went perfectly as far as I can tell and finished in about 2 hours. After that, I still needed to use the OS X updater to fetch 10.5.1 plus assorted updates since then. That took about 30 minutes.
After that I focused on getting FileMaker Pro 9 advanced working. I deactivated right before the upgrade to Leopard. After the install and updates, starting FileMaker threw an error. I expected that because when I upgraded to Leopard on my iMac, the same thing happened. That time I called FileMaker tech support and they helped me fix it. This time I had already found an post on the net by Googling that gave me some special instructions that allowed the Activation to occur on Leopard. Once that worked, I was in business.
Loving Leopard. Loving it on my machine I work on 50% of the time. I've been working a lot on the iMac since I got it just cause it is so fast and cool with Leopard. Now that my MacBook Pro has a new lease on life with Leopard, I may be using it more. We'll see. That gigantic 24" screen is pretty tempting. I just often like to work on the couch.