Oooops! Installation headache!

[3finger]

Well, leave it to me to rain on the parade, as I have been cursed by technology - even Apple's - for all of my natural life. Bought Tiger at the Apple Store in Santa Monica (great crowd), but I have been unable to install it on my iBook G4 (800 MHz, 640 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive). Very early in the process I get a message saying that an upgrade was unsuccessful due to errors. The same thing happened when I tried to install Tiger onto a new volume of the hard drive (the "archive and install"). I ran Disk Repair twice, once using my 10.3.2 startup CD, the other time using the Tiger disk. Curiously, though both times one volume was unrepairable, the message but a bit more explicit with the Tiger CD. Other than a few more spinning wheels than usual, nothing out of the ordinary has been going on with my computer previously (I'm running OS 10.3.9).

Now, I am perfectly prepared to erase my hard drive and start from scratch, but I have one possibly stupid question. If I move my current hard disk to a second hard drive (without compression or anything like that), will I be able to transfer information (e-mails, bookmarks, addresses, etc.) from the old volume to the new, fresh one with little muss and fuss, or will I literally have to start all over?

Thank you, that is all.

[Cheryl]

When Disk Utility says it can not repair the drive, it is time to get a third party utility like Disk Warrior. Boot from that CD, have it repair your drives, then you can install Tiger.

[bobw]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your current drive to the second drive. Then you can format the first drive and install Tiger. Then you can move back your bookmarks, mail, etc from the cloned drive.

[DeltaMac]

I have installed Tiger on 10 or so systems already. The read from the DVD seems to be really tough on some systems. I have had the 'install stopped with an error' 3 times, which in each case, was fixed by carefully wiping the surface of the installer DVD and trying again.
I'm not saying this will take care of all install errors, but if you havve a system that has generally been working with no problems, then try wiping the installer DVD first. Try to be patient with the process. I had one system (my personal system, lucky me!) which would not complete the Tiger install until the 6th time. This was a 500 MHz iMac, so I suspect the DVD drive just is not real reliable for reading data DVDs.

Rule 1 for Tiger: be patient, if you get install errors, try wiping the DVD and try again.