My Odyssey with the New Apple Mavericks (a lesson to be learned)

   Odyssey  That rascally devil Apple. They gave my the fantastic news that there new Mac operating system Mavericks was free. I am the biggest Apple nerd there is, so of course I began downloading it and installing it as soon as I could. Boy was that a mistake! It put me in the dreaded loop of an install that would not work because my hard disk had errors that could not be fixed. I began kicking myself for not having a back up, and two days into it, I am still working to get my computer up and running. If I had been smart, and backed everything up, I would be done by now.

     The first thing I had to do, was get back to an operating system. Thank goodness I had multiple external hard drives on hand, or I would have been in deep trouble. My hard disk in my Macbook Pro sure was not going to upload a new operating system with its unfixable disk errors so the first thing to do was download Mountain Lion to the hard drive, and then I booted my computer from there. Well, the download was very slow, so lets just say time was not well spent. 

     Once I got Mountain Lion Up, I realized its a brand new copy, and I could not access any of my old files. After several attempts at changing permissions on those files, I realized the answer was the Apple Migration App. Again, this took forever because it was migrating my whole system from my hard drive in my Mac Pro to my external hard drive. With that done, I could now boot to my old system, but I had to have the external hard drive plugged in, and everything was incredibly slow. 

     This was great though, because now I could access all of my old content. So I ran time machine backup. Even this could not run without issues. It had a hard time reading my other external hard drive and finding enough space on my drive in order to back the system up. I ended up having to run this process three times. Finally, it went, and now I had to clear my hard drive

     After clearing my hard drive, I got the dreaded folder with a question mark. Thank goodness Apple has an internet recovery mode because I am using that now restore Mt Lion to my system. Then I am going to upgrade everything to Mavericks and restore everything from my time machine back up.

     Man I learned some lessons here. One, free does not always mean better. The grinding of teeth I went through to get Mavericks was just not worth it. Two, Always back up before you do any major work. I went through a similar problem with Lion and I should have known better. Three, and this is the big one for education.....Move all of your stuff in to the cloud. Having everything in the cloud allowed my classes to keep functioning even though I was not.