Everyone seems worried that if the upgrade disc checks for Leopard on the HD to do an install, they'd have to reinstall Leopard just to do a clean install of SL. Has nobody considered the possibility that the upgrade disc will check for either Leopard OR Snow Leopard? I see no reason Apple would want to prevent someone who already HAS SL from using an upgrade disc.
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Has it occurred to no one that the SL upgrade disc might also check for SL?
- Thread starter devburke
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Yes, it has occured. See https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/714323/ for instance. The official line seems to be "no such upgrade" and prudence also requires a cleaner install then upgrading from a developer build. Since there is no SL (unless you are a developer), there is no reason for the first official release to check for a previous install of SL.
There may be workarounds if you want to take the risk of something not working right later. Developers generally know the risks and use a separate partition for the development environment.
There may be workarounds if you want to take the risk of something not working right later. Developers generally know the risks and use a separate partition for the development environment.
Well I once reinstalled Leopard (I can't remember why, I think to fix some things) over my already existing Leopard installation. Fresh, clean install. People may want to do the same thing with SL for whatever reason. And they're concerned that if ever down the line they want to do so, they'll have to clean install Leopard, then install SL from there, which would be a big hassle. So the reason for the upgrade to also check for SL would be so if one were ever to decide to reinstall SL, for whatever reason, they could, without having to first downgrade to Leopard.
You aren't taking into consideration the true worry some of us have. Which is...
What happens when I buy a brand new SSD drive in a few months and try to use the Snow Leopard upgrade disk to do a fresh install on the brand new harddrive?
Chances are I'm going to have to install Leopard first.
What happens when I buy a brand new SSD drive in a few months and try to use the Snow Leopard upgrade disk to do a fresh install on the brand new harddrive?
Chances are I'm going to have to install Leopard first.
I'm pretty sure there is a file on the upgrade disc that checks to see if a previous install is present. You can mount and burn a fresh copy without this check to perform a full upgrade.
Not sure of the legality of this (well, i'm positive it is not legal unless there is a loophole I don't know about) but I don't see a problem with it. It'll save you a lot of time and unnecessary hassle
Well ideally, if the installer didn't find Leopard or SL, it would ask you to insert a Leopard disc. It's gotta check SOMEhow!
If it simply asks me to insert the Leopard disk just to make sure I have a copy of Leopard then I will be extremely pleased. Hopefully Apple is smart enough to figure this out.
I don't think people have much to worry about--even if the 'upgrade detect' bit is either dumb or needlessly complicated, a bypass or workaround will doubtless hit the tubes within a few days of RTM.
I would be extremely pleased if they decided to do it like the personal and family licenses, all on the honor system. Why would you keep you leopard disk if you had snow leopard? I keep a disk in my laptop bag incase something goes wrong away from home (I learned to do that the hard way).