how did I move my hackintosh from Mountain Lion to Mavericks

Simple instruction by [tonymacx86] didn't work. It kind of installs, but Mountain Lion is still there after restart.

Then I went to this.

• As usual for me with OS X,  stayed there for something like 10 minutes.
• I did full backup before step 3. just tar-ed everything to backup location.
• Following instruction it went without a problem, but for me it won't boot normally :(
• So I booted into safe mode (-x at boot), applied Pjalm patches, and re-did MultiBeast and then it worked. Remind you, this is HW specific, so you must be specific here. My config is Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI + i5-3770 and I use onboard Intel graphics.
• Happily started to check if everything works and it seemed ok, nothing broken. Then it hung, did hard reset and it didn't boot again (here comes two evenings of thinking, trial and reboots + messing around in tonymacx86.com), but I fixed it. The methods are two. First and best: you understand what you do exactly and dig deep into internals. Second, the most popular: try, fail, try, fail, ... etc. For me it was a mix of both. With too much of the second, I must admit :)
• After that it was pretty obvious what to do, until...
• My wife tried to log in :) and it hung indefinitely... tried it for a few times, nothing, still hung. Then I changed her account to log in without password and it worked nicely.
• Finally I was able to do the obvious things and since then everything works :)

dealing with consequences of upgrading to mavericks

Installation process went without errors, the only issue was that notice "will complete in less than minute" stayed for at least 20 minutes while preparing installation.

I didn't took time, but something like an hour in total.

Side thought: given install size 5+ GB remembered that ubuntu hit size of 1 CD just recently :) so, wondering what's in: code or pictures ;)

As +Andrejs Prokopjevs scared me about gmail, first checked if it works at all: I can receive and send emails.

NFS mounts doesnt work:
* mount folders are gone from Volumes
* in Finder it gives you error message: problem... share doesnt exist on server...
* NFS Manager doesnt do automount

Started to investigate by simply showmount in terminal: took a long time, minutes... after that everything seem working. no problem - no need to solve it :) just recreated mountpoints manually.

Hmm, after restart my mountpoints are gone again -> will try to use NFS managers mountpoint autocreate feature, works for first trigger.

Cisco vpn works.

Citrix Receiver doesn't work out-of-the-box. There is Mavericks ready 11.8.2 version in their website, but simply installing it didnt help me. Restarted Mac, now it works :)

[MS Lync for Mac asked to be updated to 14.0.6; I let it. Annoyance again: "install time remaining: less than a minute" stayed for couple of minutes on the screen]

Force Quit function is gone from dock... Apple, really?

Default search engine for Safari is Yahoo :D

Now, Java. As I'm Oracle eBS user: 6 version it is. Get Java, I did here. After install id didn't work out of the box, even after restart. I remembered about this. Just trying to just copy and paste - it didn't work for me out of the box either. Then I looked into what I really do and fixed it. It seem that Mavericks understands symbolic links differently. Actual pieces and folders are the same. Restart just for sure :)

moving TImeMachine backups to new hdd

so, I decided to move my TimeMachine backups from current external hdd to the new one - bigger and hopefully faster

this article from apple mainly made the thing, just a couple of comments

1st thing was that in the article it is stated that Mac OS Extended (Journaled) should be used. in reality you should use the same format that you currently have for TimeMachine disk. for me it was Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)

2nd is that you really have to plan ahead a lot of time that your computer will be busy with a task. and not just you can't take it with you... for me it was several periods of few minutes when finder took all the resources, freezing computer and not allowing to do things in parallel (formatting, preparing to copy, changing permissions). for me it took ~1/2 hour to prepare and 15 hours forecast to copy my ~0.5TB of backups. I left it overnight, so I don't know if it actually took that amount, but I believe so

good luck