Snow Leopard Upgrade or Clean Install

[indigotheory]

If i go out and buy Snow Leopard for £25 can you do a clean install or is it an upgrade only meaning to do a clean install you have to install leopard first then snow leopard afterwards

thanks in advance

[ziggyonice]

Snow Leopard is UPGRADE ONLY. If you want to do a clean install of Mac OS X, you'll have to install Leopard first -- and then install Snow Leopard.

Otherwise, you can get the Mac Box Set, which has a Snow Leopard disc that allows for clean installs.

[rgarjr]

just wait until you get it and see what options it gives you on it.

[indigotheory]

ok cool, thanks for the replies

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says...have a look over in the Mac OS X forum as there are *tons* of threads about installing 10.6 already...oh yeah!

[TheCheapGeek]

Based on what we know now there are three scenarios.

If you have leopard currently installed on the drive you can do the default upgrade install, or go to disk utility on the install disk and wipe the drive, then install the OS clean.

If you have tiger installed you will have to buy the box set to get a copy of Snow Leopard, or install leopard first then use the normal upgrade copy of SL.

If you are installing on a blank drive you will have to install leopard first then install snow leopard.

[ijangaiggms]

I've successfully performed a clean install of snow leopard on my new 15inch MBP but when i tried on my old macbook 1.1 it gave me an error saying i must have leopard installed?????

[Mycatisbigfoot]

I have no clue what apple did to make people beleve that you cpuld not have a blank hard drive, I wiped my hard drive and was booted from the 10.6 disk and I am in 10.6 with out having 10.5 on my drive. My coppy was the "upgrade" like it was

[HBOC]

I was going to just install SL over Leopard, as I had just reformatted in June, but a dumb lil' mistake (iTunes XML file disappeared, ?? ) and lost my iTunes library.

I then reformatted, installed Leopard, and then SL. So, you can do a fresh install, but like others have said, there are several steps (to be honest, i just installed Leopard w/o trying to install SL on a fresh HD) that most likely need to be done...

[kevhui]

Originally Posted by ziggyonice

Snow Leopard is UPGRADE ONLY. If you want to do a clean install of Mac OS X, you'll have to install Leopard first -- and then install Snow Leopard.

Otherwise, you can get the Mac Box Set, which has a Snow Leopard disc that allows for clean installs.

I got the Fanily Pack at $49 from Apple Store and I was able to do a clean install.

[Fishrrman]

RE:
"Snow Leopard is UPGRADE ONLY. If you want to do a clean install of Mac OS X, you'll have to install Leopard first -- and then install Snow Leopard."

Nope.

My white Intel iMac came with Tiger. It has never been touched by Leopard (10.5.x) in any form. Not once, ever.

I installed Snow Leopard 10.6 onto a spare partition with nothing else on it.

Snow Leopard installed beautifully without a hitch.

One does NOT need Leopard "over which" to install Snow Leopard.

The $29.95 SL DVD will install Snow Leopard onto ANY Mac that is capable of running SL. It's that simple.

- John

[tuqqer]

Originally Posted by ziggyonice

Snow Leopard is UPGRADE ONLY.

I thought so, too, initially. But as Fishrrman pointed out, Snow Leopard is a full install disc. You can zero the drive and install directly from the SL disc.

[tinerzz]

he clean install:

To start the clean install, insert your OS X Snow Leopard disc into your Mac and restart the computer. As soon as you hear the chime of the computer restarting, immediately hold down the "c" button on your keyboard. This will force the Mac to boot from the disc. As soon as you see the Apple logo with the spinning wheel, you can release the "c" button. You may have to wait a couple of minutes for OS X to load the disc.

The first screen you get will say "Welcome to OS X Snow Leopard". Click continue to proceed to the next screen.

Now, move your mouse cursor towards the top of the screen and the OS X menu bar will appear. You should see a drop down list for "Utilities". Click "Utilities" and select "Disk Utility". Disk utility should now be opened and visible on your screen. You will see your hard drive listed along the left side of the disk utility window. Click it once to select it. Next, click the "Erase" tab located in the center of the disk utility window.

You will see three options: erase free space, security options, and erase. If you want to erase your hard drive securely with no chance of data recovery, click security options and select Zero out disks. If you just want to erase your hard drive and install Snow Leopard, click erase. The "Erase" button is the much faster option.

OS X will then ask you to verify that you are going to erase your hard drive. Make sure that the drive format is set to "OS X Extended Journaled" and type in a name for your hard drive. By default, the name would be Macintosh Hard Drive. Click erase. You have now erased everything on your hard drive. Now, you need to install Snow Leopard.

Click on the disk utility tab located on the top navigation bar, and select "Quit Disk Utility". OS X will now go back to the install screen. Select your new hard drive, agree to the license, and click install.

Installation will take approximately 30 minutes since you are doing a clean install. After it is done, you will need to fill in your personal info, location, wireless internet info, etc.. That's it you now have a clean install of OS X Snow Leopard.

Note: You will no longer have iLife on your computer. However, you can use the same discs that came with your computer to install iLife. Eject Snow Leopard, and insert the first disc that came with your computer. It should say something like Macbook Install Disc: 1. After Snow Leopard automatically detects the disc and opens the window, you will see an option to install bundled applications only. Double click this icon, type in your password and let it install. Half way through, it will ask you to insert the 2nd disc to continue. Insert the 2nd disc that came with your computer and let the installation finish.

Restart your Mac and you should now have a fresh install of OS X Snow Leopard plus your iLife software!

[almac68]

I think Apple may have mistakenly produced full install version of SL and selling it at $29. I thought its an upgrade until I installed SL on a blank HDD.

[mdrdsr]

Originally Posted by almac68

I think Apple may have mistakenly produced full install version of SL and selling it at $29. I thought its an upgrade until I installed SL on a blank HDD.

I have a MBP (4GB RAM) and am considering to the same. After your clean install, how did you get your apps & setting back? What about printers and network settings? Was it relatively painless? Or should I just do an upgrade.

I am using SuperDuper and have a bootable clone should I need to revert!

Thanks for any advice.

David

[gvdv]

Hi Everyone,
First, thanks for the really useful thread and responses therein.

I would like to ask you all some questions related to what is being discussed here.
1. I have Tiger 10.4.9, and need to get at least Leopard 10.5.7 or later in order to use Logic Studio 9. Is there any way that I can still get Leopard, as opposed to Snow Leopard?

2. If I do have to go the SL route, and use the 'Mac Box Set' (upgrade to 10.6, and also containing iLife and iWork '09 versions) will the same erase and install process described above by tinerzz be applicable?

I should say here that although I have had my Mac Pro for 2 years now, I have used it minimally - I have perhaps spent a total of about 50 hours recording a handful of songs - so the hard drive has not been used a lot and there is not very much information on it. So, maybe I could safely do an update, although I'm not sure that that is possible when going from one version of the OS to another.

Any help will be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks,
GVDV.

[gvdv]

Well, thanks for all of the replies, folks.

Just in case there is somebody out there who may be interested in this, I eventually bought the 'Mac Box' set, added a new hard drive to my Mac Pro, installed Snow Leopard on this new drive, and then followed the migration assistant prompts to transfer most of my settings across to the new drive (why it doesn't import the internet information is beyond me when it does everything else).

Of particular interest/satisfaction to me (especially given one of the messages above) is that I was able to install SL on a virgin hard drive without having previously had Leopard installed: in fact, I had Tiger 10.4.9 on my original hard drive (have kept that intact, just in case there are issues with SL over the next couple of months). So, it seems that a previous version of Leopard is not needed with the Mac Box installation. In retrospect, I suppose I could have tried the $49 upgrade, but I did want the new version of iLife which comes with the Mac Box.