I got a new iMac last week. It came installed with Leopard but the Snow Leopard disc was included in the box. Instead of following my long-standing tradition of waiting about a year to upgrade to a new OS, I foolishly installed Snow Leopard without first doing some research.

Folks, there are many, many problems with Snow Leopard, as you'll see if you read the forums at Apple. Be very careful before you upgrade. Older programs may not work. Sometimes apps don't start, sometimes they do. It's real buggy.

My worst problem is with an older external Firewire 400 hard drive. I had to get an adapter to hook up the FW400 to the new FW800 slot. When I hooked it up, everything seemed fine. The external HD showed up right away on the desktop and all the files were there. BUT the next morning when I started up the computer, I got the message "the disk you inserted cannot be read by this computer." I got that same message when I tried hooking it up to my old iMac that I had used it with.

I have years of photos on that hard drive, and if I can't get them back I'll be really sick. I have to call Apple tech support and see if they can help me. Wish me luck!

Meanwhile, I'm going to archive and reinstall Leopard on the new iMac.

Semi-native, do Repair permissions. Make sure you have the latest upgrade, 10.6.1! I have Snow Leopard too and it works fine.

rose, I did have 10.6.1 and I did repair permissions but it didn't help me get my external hard drive to be recognized.

Missy, 10.6.1 is Snow Leopard. You have Leopard.

Anyway, I just finished reinstalling Leopard and will stick with that until more bugs have been worked out of Snow Leopard.

I RECOVERED ALL MY PHOTOS!!!!

I'm so happy, I could just cry. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with Apple tech support, and we determined that the files were still on the drive, but nothing we tried could repair the disk. I then got on the Apple discussion boards for recommendations about data recovery software. Here's the one I got and it worked great. You can even download a demo to see if it will work first, so you don't have to pay out money for nothing:

It's ProSoft Engineering Data Rescue II and here's the link:

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_sysreq.php?PHPSESSID=8b4e94f3f116...

I highly recommend it if you need to recover data. It can even recover deleted files.

Yes, I've run into quite a few bugs myself with Snow Leopard. I'm surprised, as all the press/reviews I read raved about how it's more solid and faster -- a "bug fixing" release they called it.

In reality, Apple totally rewrote the entire Finder, to be 64-bit native, if I understand correctly. This means it's like a brand new program, complete with new bugs. It has to be this way, but yes, it means there's a lot to fix.

One issue that constantly irks me is that launching System Preferences never works the first time -- I have to force it to quit, then launch again, to reboot into Windows.

There have been many other random bugs I've run into -- definitely a lot -- but nothing I haven't been able to work around. But yeah, I'm definitely hoping they fix a number of them in 10.6.2.