PGP and Snow Leopard

I have a number of Macs at home. Some might say too many however each one plays a specific role: one for music creation, one for photography and one for general household use.

Oh, and the laptop for work.

I decided to finally upgrade the work laptop. I say finally because I knew it would be a big job.

When the MacBook Pro was initially prepped, someone decided to encrypt the whole disk as opposed to selected folders. As I keep most corporate documents somewhere other than my laptop, an encrypted “Work” folder would likely have done the job of safeguarding any confidential documents.

PGP Whole Disk Encryption was used on the drive. That software would not allow OS X 10.5 to migrate to OS X 10.6 without a decrypt and uninstall of PGP.

Upgrading my Macs at home took less than 40 minutes. Upgrading my MacBook Pro took over 30 hours.

First step was to do a full backup of the machine. 6 hours.

Second step was to decrypt the hard drive. 22 hours.

Third step was to uninstall PGP. Quick. Less than 10 minutes.

Fourth step was to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Glitch.

The install could not find a startup disk. Great. Now what?

On the Apple support site, the remedy was to delete the partition and start over. That seemed somewhat harsh and I did not want to spend another 10 to 20 hours building a machine from scratch.

The solution was rather trivial. I booted off the Mac OS X 10.6 install disc. I ran Disk Utility. I selected my laptop’s hard drive. I selected the partition tab. And I resized the partition. Not by much. A few meg. Applied the resize and voila. The install could now see the startup disk. Obviously a sloppy uninstall by PGP.

Fifth step after the upgrade was to download software updates. 4 hours. Very slow Internet.

And, after 30 hours or so of futzing around, the MacBook Pro is now current at OS X 10.6.6.