DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The time has finally come to upgrade this creaky MacOS 9.2.2 workstation to a modern, efficient, secure, feature-rich operating system: I’m switching to WinXP.

Heh. Pick up your jaw. I’m only kidding.

I am sorely past due for migrating to OS X (which I use and embrace on my laptop). Upgrade pain is acute in my case — I’m so thoroughly wedded to my particular collection of apps and utilities that any minor disruption could take weeks to overcome. And a few of the apps I rely on don’t exist for OS X, so I have to find uncomfortable replacements. Join me as I begin to bite this bullet, hopefully without blowing the back of my skull all over the wall.

1. Make backups: set up firewire drive, find Retrospect installer disk, find license key, install Retrospect, run backup, run backup again after reducing match criteria because archive was bigger than OS filesize limit (2gb), run four more backups with carefully-selected criteria to keep archive size down.
2. Update SCSI card firmware for OS X compatibility: decipher cryptic notes on vendor’s website, download latest utility, download latest firmware, act surprised when latest firmware package contains utility newer than “latest” utility downloaded separately, run utility to flash firmware, ignore configuration screen with about 75 incomprehensible parameter-tuning widgets in hopes that the defaults are OK.
3. Install new boot drive: find baggie of surplus machine screws that’s buried in the garage somewhere, remove drive sled from computer, mount new drive to sled, restore sled to computer, discover that the single remaining power cable won’t reach new drive. Pull on harness, cut cable tie, re-route many connectors, fiddle. Search in vain for 4'' extension cord that I know I have, somewhere. Re-route connectors again. Finally make everything fit. Close case.
4. Find Jaguar CDs, which haven’t been seen since last September: look at prominent place on shelf where other utility disks are kept, but find (for reasons I cannot explain) only the old Panther disks. Look in storage area under stairs where all remaining media is kept. Look in closet. Look through media box again. Search desk. Look through media box again. (Yes, I am a George Carlin comedy sketch.) Finally find Panther disks in box of ancient audio CDs moved from the living room because we never play them any more.
5. Install Panther: Format new disk with Disk Utility; see error message that system can’t boot from new drive and therefore OS can’t be installed, re-partition new drive, see error again, call Apple, explain problem, learn that OS X drive has to be “primary” ATA drive. Pull both drives from case, look up jumper configuration on vendor website, reset master/slave jumpers, reinstall drives, re-attach power cables. Re-run installer. Act nonchalant when it works. After all, why wouldn’t it work?

For most people, the above would describe an afternoon that, if not exactly pleasant, at least resulted in success. But I have complex needs, or at least a complex configuration, so I was only beginning.

My OS 9 system had three logical drives: an ATA boot drive, a SCSI RAID-1 (striped) drive for applications, a SCSI RAID-0 (mirrored) drive for data. I’d need to upgrade the RAID drivers for OS X. The process can’t be reversed.

The striped array came right up. The mirrored array — the one with five years’ worth of data — did not. Sigh.

I shot an email to the vendor. I know they work weekends because they’ve bailed me out once before, when a previous upgrade went awry.

And then I addressed the next critical phase of any OS X upgrade: setting up cute desktop icons.

BTW, OS X kicks ass. Don’t mistake my tale of woe for a general gripe about Apple or even about the third-party RAID software I’m using. I wish computers were easier to set up, but I recognize that I push mine harder than most people.