Regular readers of this blog (all six of you) may have noticed I’ve been a bit light on the posts this week. That’s because I’ve been installing Leopard on my Macs and ran into a self-inflicted problem during the Leopardification of my MacBook. Here’s a lesson on how trying to skirt past an alert message can buy you a heap of trouble.

After you get past the initial option screens, the Leopard installer checks the integrity of the DVD before continuing. Just a few minutes into this process, I got an error message explaining that Leopard could not be installed because of a problem with the disk. The message advised me to clean the disk and try again.

Since I had just then removed the DVD from its package, I could hardly see how it got scratched or dirty. But I obliged the message, cleaned the disk and ran the installer again. Same message.

Impatient to get Leopard on my MacBook, I convinced myself that the disk checking mechanism was wrong and decided on my next attempt to bypass it by clicking the “skip” button. Not a good idea.

At first it looked like I had fooled the installer; the progress bar slowly moved across the screen. But about halfway through it stopped and presented this heart-stopping message in large letters: “Installation failed.” A smaller message informed me that one of the language packages could not be opened. The disk-checking mechanism had been right after all.

Because the installation was partly completed, I no longer had either a complete Tiger or Panther system on my MacBook. The internal drive was unbootable.

I didn’t panic because I had the full contents of the MacBook stored as a disk image on a network hard drive (thanks to the marvelous shareware backup tool SuperDuper!). But I still needed to bring the MacBook back to life.

After some time toying with Target Disk mode and consulting with an tech expert provided to me by Apple, I hit upon an idea. I booted off the Leopard DVD but this time deselected all the language packages in the options window. I still needed to click “skip” on the disk check, but by then I had nothing to lose.

Leopard finally installed on the MacBook. All my old user files were moved to a “Previous System” folder because I did an Archive and Install on the botched first attempt. So I didn’t lose any data, but it was a scary experience. As a veteran user I should know better, but I succumbed to Leopard fever. Learn from my mistake.

My review of Leopard will appear in The Sun’s Plugged In section Thursday, Nov. 15, as well as here on baltimoresun.com.