If you use FileVault in Tiger, be sure it is turned off before you upgrade (via the standard upgrade or via Migration Assistant) to Leopard.

Brian, a Mac Law Students reader who attends Boalt Hall, wrote in with this warning:

I installed Leopard on my Macbook last night (after using SuperDuper! to create a bootable image on an external hard drive, and using the “Erase and Install” option). Everything went well, and I immediately used migration assistant to pull my files from the disk image on my external hard drive. I logged into Leopard without a hitch, ran the software update, yet after the reboot, I was unable to log into my account — an error message told me that the FileVault image was corrupted, or something along those lines.

I frantically scoured the web from another computer, and it seems that this is a widespread issue (Murphy’s law in action — I somehow saw only the forum entries of painless installs before installing myself :)

This all resulted in about 10 hours of expletives, whirring hard drives, and no reading for Admin Law. I was eventually able to restore from my Tiger image, but it seems that the FileVault sparse image is now corrupted beyond what disk utility can fix (so I can’t turn off FileVault).

Thanks for the info, Brian.

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