Installing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with FileVault causes you trouble and data loss
I’m really upset at Apple right now. I had FileVault enabled for my home folder. Turns out you should disable it when installing Leopard, or all hell breaks loose. In my case, the latter meant doing a clean install. And I can only praise my wisdom for making a backup before installing (quite unusual for me). But it still sucks bigtime.
Turns out that when you have a FileVault home folder, Leopard can’t open it. What’s more weird, it actually logs you in fine after completing the install, so you can see that everything works, and think it’s all fine. Well, no. Upon next boot, it can’t sign you in and tells you that the FileVault folder is bad.
There are some threads about it in Apple forums, as well as other places. There may be ways to get it working after the fact, but the easiest thing to do is just to disable FileVault.
I have to agree with a commenter on the board.
Agreed. Apple, I love everything else about this upgrade, but this is honestly the dumbest, most irresponsible thing you’ve ever done. Well, at least insofar as has ever affected me.
Apple just lost serious karma point and street credit with me. All this fancy shmancy stars theme and a “cool” video after installing can’t hide the fact that you’ve screwed up your engineering on this one. It’s difficult to look like a smart company in my eyes after this.
Again, I can only praise myself for making backup of my home folder. Still, it causes me a lot of lost time as I have to redownload, reinstall and reconfigure a bunch of little things, and it’s just annoying. I have to look up all those install DVD-s for things and waste my time cleaning up after Apple not doing its work properly, instead of being able to do my own work.
Think about it. FileVault is for security-conscious people, and these people are usually smart. Trashing the experience of smart people who often influence others’ opinions is not really a smart product development strategy. I know that it may have said something about it in the documentation and technically Apple may be off the hook here, but for such a critical thing, it should be an integral part of install experience. Either just make it work, or if it’s too hard, don’t let me install the thing and tell me to disable FileVault before proceeding — this would have been a fine solution.
The company who likes to bash and make fun of other companies while trying so hard to look smart themselves is always held to higher standards. Apple, you violated these standards here.
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