Boy, I installed Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) last night and it did not go very smoothly. Everything is fine now, but it was a bumpy ride for a few hours till I found the solution.

This software is pretty new (a few weeks I think) so you know there will be some bugs, always are. I was just eager to try it out, so I backed up important files and proceeded to install Leopard.

It got like 60% done and then failed to install. There was some message about some language file corruption or something. so I plugged on and tried it again. This time it was successful, restarted, got a blue screen for about 1 minute then it booted up fine, or so I thought.

I was playing around until the software update popped up and asked if I wanted to install an upgrade to 10.5.1

I figured why not and clicked upgrade. That’s when the real trouble started!

The administrator approval window pops up, which is normal, but this time, instead of just asking me for my password, it asks for a user name and a password! And it won’t take the information!

So I do a bit of digging (on another computer of course) and find out that the Leopard install has changed my user to a standard user and not an admin user. In fact, THERE IS NO USER ADMINISTRATOR in the whole computer. This spells trouble.

I spent the next 2 hours trying all sorts of passwords, scouring Apple’s web site, searching Google for possible solutions and getting pissed.

I kept coming upon 2 solutions. One was to boot up to something called single-user mode (gets you to the unix part of the machine where only keyboard commands do anything) or to boot up the machine from the install dvd and change the password from there.

Fine. The problem was, neither option worked! The machine just kept booting up into Leopard and not into either of these other methods. I was frustrated beyond belief.

So at this point, I could use the computer, but I could not install any software or change any system settings.

I happened upon this one forum where some guy described a very similar situation and then he says he solved it by TAKING HIS KEYBOARD off one port and putting it directly into the machine USB port.

Ha! I took my keyboard off the USB hub, hooked it to the USB port of the iMac and booted up and it worked! I was able to change my root password and make my usual account an administrator account once again and the problem was solved.

I sure wish Apple would post this as a possible solution. It would have saved me 2 hours of frustration and I could have played with my new Leopard install for 2 more hours.

So far no other Leopard problems yet.

Here are the links to the post I found and to the Apple page for the fix…

Post…http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5896462

Apple fix…http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306876

Hope this helps someone else.