Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Lion Clean Install Requires Snow Leopard Disk?

PigsOnTheWing said:
Exactly. I have booted Lion from a thumb drive and successfully installed it onto a brand new hard drive without ever being asked anything about Snow Leopard. I guess I'm missing something. :confused:
Click to expand...

How do you expect everyone to know that method off-hand? :confused:

Regardless, the fact that Apple, the king of usability and seamlessness, would make someone do that is ridiculous.
 
Everyone seems to be missing something important

A Snow Leopard disc will ONLY be required if installing a brand new drive from scratch. You can STILL do a clean install from the download without burning it or copying it to USB.

When you install Lion the first time, the installer creates a recovery partition, fundamentally building the install disc into your hard drive. After that you can erase your OS partition and install Lion cleanly if you wish. Just don't erase the recovery partition.

So only the FIRST time you install will need to be an upgrade. After you have the recovery partition in there you can clean-install to your heart's content.

The only time it's not a great user experience is if you have a hard drive failure, at which point you will need help from a professional (or hobbyist) anyway, and they will know how to handle the situation. It's not a user friendly solution to install Snow Leopard, upgrade, then clean install, but a pro or hobbyist will have the skills and tools.
 
wait...

Steve , I normally agree with you on other stuff, but not having a disk for the os AND having to clean install snow leopard first then download lion? common, thats a little ridiculous. I can understand if you're trying to save a coin for the new campus, and i'd love to help out!! but just ship a disk so we can end this nonsense please. :confused: and what are to do if we suffer a death of a hard drive? ask the genius bar to kindly re-install? right...
 
guess i will have to find an .ISO and make a bootable flash drive once it comes out. good thing an 8 gb is only like $15 now.
 
Ugh. I hope the Developer workaround (burn the DMG to disk or flashdrive) will work with final. Downloading 4+ GB to 4 Macs will suck. I just want to download it once and then install if from media on the others. Plus the idea of a total harddrive failure, I'd rather not do the SL > Lion thing.
 
gramirez2012 said:
You only have to do it once, because once Lion is installed, it will put a recovery partition on the hard disk. So you won't need a disc after the initial install.
Click to expand...

2 things:

1) I don't want a "recovery partition", and it'd really be nice if people (Apple included) wouldn't use "recovery" terminology as it confuses the issue and connotes "baggage".

2) I fill every HD I get (internal and otherwise). I'm not interested giving even 4GB to the system for a wasted "recovery partition"

...and I'd be willing to bet I'm not alone.
 
So.. Has everybody suddenly forgotten you can just burn the Lion dmg to a dvd (probably dual layer) and use it as a backup install disc?
 
Watabou said:
This is un-apple like. Come on apple, what's so wrong about physical medias? They can at least provide a USB for those who need it...
Click to expand...

Un-Apple like? The same company who removed the optical drive from the MBA? The same company who won't upgrade to blu-ray? The same company who has the largest online digital store in the world? The same company who removed the CD image from it's iTunes logo?

No, seems very Apple-like to me actually.
 
I would understand requiring a Snow Leopard DVD to check authenticity during installation, but to require the installation of Snow Leopard and then Lion on top of that, you can remove the "Clean" from "Clean Install".
 
squirrelist said:
A Snow Leopard disc will ONLY be required if installing a brand new drive from scratch. You can STILL do a clean install from the download without burning it or copying it to USB.
Click to expand...

Actually, from what I'm hearing, many of the new machines require a hard drive with Apple's special firmware on it to work (or some sort of thermal monitoring?).

So replacing the drive yourself it out anyways...
 
If you had to get to this point to decide not to buy/install Lion, you have probably been sleeping.

A "normal" Mac OSX upgrade is enough of a trauma, but now they are heaping further dilemma on the upgrade situation. I'll switch up when needed. Lion is not needed. They'll probably still support Snow Leopard for another couple years until 10.8 or even beyond.
 
MathijsDelva said:
So.. Has everybody suddenly forgotten you can just burn the Lion dmg to a dvd (probably dual layer) and use it as a backup install disc?
Click to expand...

Yes, this is just another case of several MR users going ballistic without stopping to think about it for a second.

Edit: Also, I personally still think that shipping machines with pre-built Lion install restore partitions wouldn't be out of the question. And if users are leary about losing that partition in case of a failed hard drive, you could always copy the image to another drive for backup. They're are so many solutions to this issue.
 
lol, because people here this is real ?

Get a brain, how people with brand new machine not supported by SL will do ?

You think they will have to buy a new mac ? Just lol ...
 
Lesser Evets said:
If you had to get to this point to decide not to buy/install Lion, you have probably been sleeping.

A "normal" Mac OSX upgrade is enough of a trauma, but now they are heaping further dilemma on the upgrade situation. I'll switch up when needed. Lion is not needed. They'll probably still support Snow Leopard for another couple years until 10.8 or even beyond.
Click to expand...

Trauma? I didn't know that. I've only upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard more than once, and had no trauma. Maybe some incompatible drivers, but no major failures or crashes.
 
Veg said:
I'm sorry but did anyone notice that the person who e-mailed SJ misspelled excited? They wrote it as exited, rather then excited.
C'mon have some respect when you email the great SJ and spell check your sentences.
Click to expand...

Steve, bursting out in anger due to the wrong spelling, responded with a typo as well, as seen in "Leopaard". :rolleyes:
 
Hindsite is 20/20 but the cat names could have been better.


10.6 should have been Tiger and 10.8 should have been Lion

And 10.7 seems transitional. A little of the future but still requiring the past and so been called Liger.
 
Everyone seems to be forgetting that, once Lion is released, not only will the OS be installed on the machine but the chances are that Apple will also provide a USB drive - just like on the MB-Air - but across all their products. If they really want to phase out the use of discs for their OS's, then it makes perfect sense that they use the same USB drive for each of their products.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back