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Sorbet Leopard Install Problems

LCARS

Well-known member
Has anyone else encountered issues while trying to "install" the labor of love that is Sorbet Leopard?

My original attempts restored correctly but the computer could see no system on it and would flash the ? at boot. My second attempts with another download (from Macintosh Garden) will not restore to the partition: "Restore Failure no such file or directory."

I'm using Tiger on the target MDD to restore from the HDD to the SSD (on the SATA controller). The SSD wasn't cheap so I'm not eager to erase it too many times. Is there an un-intuitive trick that is missing from the installation instructions?

Despite the failed restore, I can still select it as a startup disk but it doesn't work and reverts back to Tiger.
 
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Daniël

Well-known member
The few times I tried to download Sorbet Leopard from the Macintosh Garden, I kept getting corrupted images. So it might be that. Frankly, I just gave up on it due to that frustrating experience.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Frankly, I just gave up on it due to that frustrating experience.
I'm getting close to this myself. Yet I keep reading posts over at MacRumors and on YouTube, praising the build and apparently not having any issues downloading the right copy. My MDD 1.42 Rebuild is so close to being done..this is the last step (or so I thought).
 

beachycove

Well-known member
I downloaded it from the Garden today and installed it on a PB 15” 1.67 without any trouble. The thing is a bit odd because it’s not an actual installer that you get, but a disk image that has to be installed by Disk Utility, the upshot being that you need a separate boot drive with an OS (I used the optical drive) to do the deed. As for the OS, it appears to work as promised. I’m in the very, very early stages of testing, obviously, but first impressions are that it is noticeably snappier than Leopard on the same hardware.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
@beachycove Could you describe your process? I downloaded it, unzipped it, and prepared the target SSD (a different drive on the SATA bus) with a single partition in Apple Partition Map format, then used Disk Utility to restore to that partition. But mine either won't restore properly or will restore but won't boot.

When you went through the process, did it simply boot into the desktop?
 

beachycove

Well-known member
Sorry, I didn’t see this until just now.

I copied the image file to a usb stick on an intel iMac. On the PowerBook, contrary to the instructions, I didn’t create a new partition (couldn’t see the point in my case) but simply installed on my existing single partition drive via restore in Disk Utility after booting from a Tiger installer DVD/CD and opening the installer’s copy of Disk Utility. There was little on the hard drive to worry about so I just went ahead, installing Sorbet over an earlier, regular Leopard x.5.8 system. I was ready for a wipe of the drive if failure meant that it was needed, but it wasn‘t necessary. As it happened, all applications, my user, and as far as I can see everything I might have wanted (apart from a couple of software serials needing re-entered, which is only par for the course) got preserved.

The machine booted right up once done, though it took a minute or so to settle (kext files being rebuilt). You get a new superuser with a new password that needs to be followed in the read-mes, and this certainly needs cleaned up for security purposes before going much further with it (!), and there are scripts that are recommended, but otherwise the business is straightforward. I didn’t ask Disk Utility to erase the drive, obviously.

It really does seem noticeably faster. I can’t speak to stability, as I haven’t used it extensively, and I’m not sure I would rely on it for anything in the long term, but so far I’m very impressed that someone managed to turn this out in a hack.
 

jdlanza

Well-known member
@beachycove has the right approach to this! I struggled with the "official" process. CCC 3.4.7 (the version Macintosh Garden links to for use in the process) wouldn't mount the disk image downloaded from MG's site. I checked the DMG with Disk Utility and it was not corrupt.

In my case I did partition the drive, because I wanted to dual boot between Tiger and Sorbet Leopard but, other than, I got the same results as @beachycove. My installation is on a 17" 1GHz PowerBook with 2GB RAM and seems to be "peppier" than 10.5.8 on the same machine.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Thank you beachycove & jdlanza. I've tried it again and it won't do it. Amazingly frustrating for what should be something simple.

Tiger on the HDD sees the SSD on the SATA controller and Startup Disk sees it presumably as a valid boot volume because its on the list of available boot volumes. Yet when I restart from the Startup Disk selector it momentarily goes to the flashing question mark folder then boots into Tiger.

Booting from the SATA controller does take longer to find than the HDD on the board ATA bus. Maybe its long enough for the computer to pick the ATA bus. I'll try it with that HDD disconnected. This is using the latest R15 build and the destination SSD reports 11.87 GB as being used, so that sounds about right for the OS.

I realized that I forgot to mention that the SSD is on the Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA. Its connected to an internal channel. I'm looking at the data sheet and it doesn't mention being bootable. There is an internal only version that does indicate that its bootable. Yikes...could this be my problem? A fancy SATA card that isn't bootable?
 
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LCARS

Well-known member
Bingo...Its not a bootable SATA card sadly. I should have checked that first. Well, problem solved! I took your advice @beachycove and didn't go through the partitioning process again. I also didn't use CCC as the R15 page at MacintoshGarden suggests. I tried and it didn't restore anything, just "cloned" the DMG file to the SSD.

Disk Utility worked just fine. The 1.42 MDD is repairing disk permissions and then the fun begins!
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Well I jinxed it- I shouldn't have said anything about fun...

Any large data transfer causes it to freeze. No beach ball, no 'application not responding', just a good old fashioned frozen mouse. Stability so far isn't inspiring.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
I’d like to try duplicating that. What were you doing?
There have been many attempts over many re-installations. All the same outcome.

The first was copying 209GB of music from an external LaCie drive via Sonnet eSata. My first attempt was dragging and dropping into the Library -> frozen. Then I tried going through the File menu -> Add to Library and selected the folder -> frozen.

After all the I tried to drag over 40GB of files. It wrote about 700MB then froze.

I never tried to do all this from a USB stick. The eSata drive works fine from Tiger to Monterey and my thoughts are if Sorbet Leopard can't manage this drive (or whatever the problem might be) then I have to use factory standard Leopard.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Thank you for trying. When time permits I'm going to try out Sorbet Leopard on my Quicksilver and 12" G4 to see if its unique to this MDD.

One thing that I find weird about Leopard (and Sorbet Leopard) is that after repairing disk permissions, I can then check those repaired permissions to find some are differing again. I did not have this problem in Tiger.
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Update: I found a firmware update for the Sonnet eSata card, which seems to have fixed the problem of importing large data sets. It wasn't listed under Firmware on Sonnet's support site but rather Drivers. So far so good.

Under 10.4 and 10.5.0 the card operated normally. In my testing the freezing issue appeared from 10.5.8 to 10.5.9 so from the last official Leopard release to Sorbet Leopard R15.
 
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