Leopard to Lion with USB Drive

[jackie1998]

So last week I stopped into an apple store in an attempt to find Snow Leopard so I can upgrade my macbook (currently running Leopard) to Lion, and two apple employees helping me out told me about a Lion USB drive for $69 that would not only allow me to go straight from Leopard to Lion, but also serve as a family pack that would let me upgrade all my devices.

I just broke the USB drive open to use it now, and saw that I can't just use the loaded installer to upgrade to Lion. From what I gather online, I can use the USB drive if I clean my system and reboot my hard drive entirely, but this also technically violates Apple's licensing? Can anyone speak to this at all? It's incredibly strange to me that employees from Apple would specifically sell the USB drive to me as a direct Leopard to Lion upgrade when a) it's not an easy upgrade to do and b) it's not even technically legal.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

So last week I stopped into an apple store in an attempt to find Snow Leopard so I can upgrade my macbook (currently running Leopard) to Lion, and two apple employees helping me out told me about a Lion USB drive for $69 that would not only allow me to go straight from Leopard to Lion, but also serve as a family pack that would let me upgrade all my devices.

I just broke the USB drive open to use it now, and saw that I can't just use the loaded installer to upgrade to Lion. From what I gather online, I can use the USB drive if I clean my system and reboot my hard drive entirely, but this also technically violates Apple's licensing? Can anyone speak to this at all? It's incredibly strange to me that employees from Apple would specifically sell the USB drive to me as a direct Leopard to Lion upgrade when a) it's not an easy upgrade to do and b) it's not even technically legal.

I suspect you're misreading the license agreement - there won't be any legal issue as long as you're not upgrading a so-called "Hackintosh". That said, though, what you mentioned about being unable to perform a direct upgrade from Leopard to Lion is true - BUT you can work around that if you use Time Machine to back up your Mac currently. Yes, you'll have to reformat the drive and start fresh, but that won't matter because Migration Assistant can migrate your data from your Time Machine backup. If you use disk cloning software instead, Migration Assistant can handle that too.