Due to other commitments this weekend I only had time to upgrade my MacBook on Saturday. This went fine, taking less than an hour from start to finish, so this afternoon the first of the to iMacs ( 20″ ) was upgraded and again no issues.

Finally tonight BigMac, my 24″ iMac was lined up for its turn. After running for about half an hour the install failed and I was offered the option to restore from Time Machine backup ! ARGH.

First check was to see if BigMac had actually started to upgrade so I opened Disk Utility which reported the drive correctly and stated that the OS was 10.5.8 so my first thought was that the install had not actually started and that the original OS may still be bootable. After setting the internal drive as the boot disk and rebooting I quickly realised this was NOT the case, the Mac just rebooted and powered off !

I then tried connecting BigMac using target disk mode to my MacBook to see if the drive still had my data on it. Target disk mode failed to work and the iMacs drive did not appear as a volume on the MacBook.

Next I booted back off the Snow Leopard install disk again and this time went into Terminal from the Options menu. A quick directory listing of /Volumes/Bigdisk ( BigMacs internal drive ) showed that all the data was in fact still intact so I decided to err on the side of caution and attach an external firewire drive and make a copy of the data before starting a clean install ( at this point the smart alecs in the audience will be saying, “should have made a bootable copy of system before starting the install”, which is entirely correct, however Bigdisk is 1Tb and I dont have another 1Tb drive to copy to so…. )

So at the moment I am still copying each directory from BigMacs home folder onto firewire disk so I can do a clean install. Before doing the clean install I may try the restore from Time Machine option just out of interest….

@Zerock sent me a tweet earlier this evening to say that he had experienced a similar install failure but he had not as yet attempted to recover the failed machine.

I would be keen to hear from other early adopters of Snow Leopard who have had similar ( or different ) problems with the upgrade this weekend. Drop me a line here or send me a tweet at @UKMac

According to other @MyAppleStuff it appears that Spanish Mac users were similarly disappointed. Many countries on the other hand seemed to have more luck, Twitter was alive yesterday with reports of early deliveries from Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and US.

What was your experience yesterday ? Did you risk pre-ordering and if so from which suppliers ? Was your order delivered yesterday ? Do you think that pre-orders SHOULD arrive on day of release ? Will you go to Apple Store to buy next time ( UKMac Will ! )

I suspect there are going to be a lot of Mac Users spending this weekend upgrading ! I know I will.