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Mountain Lion: It's called a developer preview for a reason

Every time a developer preview of a new version of Mac OS X or iOS arrives, we at TUAW wait for the onslaught of emails telling us about the favorite apps that did or did not work, peripherals that suddenly won't work, or machines that end up being totally borked. Jason O'Grady at ZDNet has written a wonderful cautionary tale about what might happen if you pull the tail of Apple's OS X Mountain Lion.

O'Grady installed OS X Mountain Lion DP1 on a backup 11" MacBook Air and basically loved the new OS and how well it worked with most of his existing apps. He was impressed with the integration of iOS capabilities and the improved security. And then all hell broke loose.

While working with eBay client iSale on the MBA, things started going bad -- the app crashed repeatedly. So O'Grady decided to try a reboot ... which didn't work. To make a long story short, he "elected to take the "nuke and pave" option. I ended up booting from my Lion flash drive, reformatting the SSD and re-installing the relatively stable Mac OS 10.7 (non-Mountain) Lion. Patching it up and calling it a day."

O'Grady ends the post with a reminder that all of us who are anxious to try out developer previews need to have pounded into our brains every time Apple tempts us with a new and shiny OS release -- don't install developer previews on production machines, and always assume that the worst will happen. As O'Grady found out, sometimes that worst possible case does happen and in this situation, you'll be mauled by an angry Mountain Lion.