Blue screen of death strikes Leopard install

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 29 Oct 2007 at 09:37

Mac users upgrading to Leopard have been reporting a blue screen of death after rebooting their machine for the first time.

The reports emerged within hours of Leopard's release, with users flooding Apple's support forums to complain that they were locked out of their machines after running the default upgrade option.

Apple acknowledged the problems on Sunday with a posting on its support forums, "After completing an upgrade installation of Leopard and restarting the computer, a 'blue screen' may appear for an extended period of time."

"It may be necessary to perform an Archive and Install installation of Leopard. Applications, plug-ins, and other software may have to be reinstalled after an Archive and Install."

As complaints mounted the finger was squarely pointed at Unsanity's APE (Application Enhancer) software, which allows users to customise their operating system. After an initial bout of denial on its blog, the company admitted on Sunday that older versions of its software were to blame and advised everyone to update before attempting to upgrade their operating systems.

"The problems some people were experiencing while doing the Mac OS X upgrade and being unable to boot due to Application Enhancer [APE] installed may have been caused by the 'old' versions not properly recognizing the system version," says Slava Karpenko, an Unsanity LLC programmer, in the blog.

"Please accept our sincere apologies for all the trouble that was caused," he continues. "We have underestimated the number of people running 'outdated' versions of our software."