Snow Leopard headache

Being the helpless technologist I am, I had to install Snow Leopard (OS/X 10.6) the day it shipped. Actually I’ve been looking forward to this release for some time — a release almost entirely focused on making the operating system more stable, faster and more compact. How novel! Of the handful of new features coming out, the most useful for me will be improved Microsoft Exchange Server integration — something I haven’t tried out yet.

Unfortunately, the point of this post is not how splendid 10.6 is. Now that it’s up and running, I’ve no complaints. But getting it up and running — that was another story. My advice: if you are faint-of-heart when it comes to your computer upgrade failing mid-stride, wait a little while. We’ll be seeing a 10.6.1 release soon, and hopefully it fixes the problems I ran into while upgrading my Mac Book Pro.

The most disturbing problem was the installer crash, something very uncharacteristic for Apple software. After getting the preliminaries out of the way, the 10.6 installer was merrily chugging along at about 15 minutes into the upgrade when it just disappeared. I had glanced away from the screen so I assumed the computer was still doing something — but ten minutes later I was still staring at a blank screen. Completely blank. No indication of life beyond my mouse pointer. I had to do a hardware reboot, holding down the power key until the system restarted.

Fortunately, the installer restarted automatically and detected it’s failure. I was given the option to “recover” my failed install attempt, which I did. This time the installer finished the job, the only incident being a point where it got hung up around “40 minutes remaining” and ultimately took close to one and a half hours to finish. All appeared good and my machine rebooted just fine. Then I tried to login.

I ended up staring at a blank screen again. The same one, with no sign of life but my mouse pointer.

Here are the steps I followed to diagnose and ultimately repair the problem. Fortunately, it didn’t require going back to Leopard:

1. First, verify that it’s your specific account and not the system. Try logging in as your systems’ Administrator, or another user. If this works, it’s a good sign you have a problem with your login items.
2. Start up in “safe mode” by restarting your computer and holding down the “shift” key.
3. With “safe mode” enabled (you’ll see an indication on the login panel), log in under your troubled user account.
4. Disable all of your login items using Preferences.
5. Try rebooting and logging in again. If you still have problems (as I did — once again, getting the blank screen and having to hard-reboot), you may have a font management problem. In my case, I restarted in safe mode, removed all of my fonts except those in the default system and, just to be safe, uninstalled Linotype FontExplorer.