Lion Upgrade - New iMac

[Lihi]

I just got my new iMac 27" 3.1 with Snow Leopard.
at first i thought i'll wait for Lion to get an update and then upgrade, but now i'm not so sure.
i want to do a clean install when i update, wipe my hard drive and then install lion fresh.
so for now, i don't want to start installing all my adobe products on the new iMac if i'll be erasing it all in the next few weeks. feels like a waste of time..

i know lion has bugs and all, but it's not like it'll harm my new iMac, i'll just wait for the updates.

would love to hear your thoughts, and would also love to hear what's the best way to do a clean and fresh install of lion on a new iMac.

 

[88 King]

You can install Lion on an external hard drive to test it out.

 

[OutGolfn]

I was in the same boat as you, but just decided to upgrade instead. It has been working fine ever since with Lion.

 

[rkaufmann87]

My recommendation is if you're nervous about Lion is to download it however delay installing it until you're ready. If you want to wait until 10.7.1 or 10.7.2 is released you can install then simply do a software update which I'm guessing will be done via the Mac App Store.

That being said IMHO I've found Lion to be pretty stable but I'm running on a late 2007 iMac and 2010 MBA so I don't have any first hand experience with the most current hardware.

 

[blevins321]

To do the clean install, download the installer from the App Store, then do the View Package Contents to find the DMG. Move this somewhere. Then open disk utility and restore the image to a freshly-erased flash drive. Boot from it then you can run the drive-based disk utility to wipe your internal drive. Then install Lion with it.

 

[Lihi]

To do the clean install, download the installer from the App Store, then do the View Package Contents to find the DMG. Move this somewhere. Then open disk utility and restore the image to a freshly-erased flash drive. Boot from it then you can run the drive-based disk utility to wipe your internal drive. Then install Lion with it.

my iMac will automatically boot from the flash drive? then it'll guide me through wiping my drive?

sorry for the noob questions, i'm not that new to mac but it's the first time i install a new OS, and i don't want to mess it up.

 

[Don Kosak]

Get a cheap external FireWire or USB disc drive with 500GB or so space.

Install Lion to the external drive. (you can pick it instead of your main hard drive during install.)

To boot, power up your Mac while holding down the Option key. You'll have the choice between booting Snow Leopard or Lion.

While booted in Lion, you can still access any of your files on your internal drive.

Play with Lion, make sure your software works right, and only upgrade your internal drive once you're confident everything is working.

I've gone Lion on all of my Macs. Haven't had any problems. The only software that hasn't worked for me was an older version (5.x) of Parallels.

 

[Lihi]

Get a cheap external FireWire or USB disc drive with 500GB or so space.

Install Lion to the external drive. (you can pick it instead of your main hard drive during install.)

To boot, power up your Mac while holding down the Option key. You'll have the choice between booting Snow Leopard or Lion.

While booted in Lion, you can still access any of your files on your internal drive.

Play with Lion, make sure your software works right, and only upgrade your internal drive once you're confident everything is working.

I've gone Lion on all of my Macs. Haven't had any problems. The only software that hasn't worked for me was an older version (5.x) of Parallels.

sounds great, thank you!
just a little worried i'll mess something up with the clean install on my internal drive.

 

[temppa]

I have the new iMac 27" 3.4 machine myself and the Lion works fine. Except. Except with one particular scenario, where it usually freezes my computer.

When I'm on Facebook and someone has linked a YouTube -video and I start playing it. It works fine on the FB page. But if, after starting it on FB, I decide to play it on YT, it freezes my machine.

I am using the beta version of the Flash, so it might not come up with the latest stable release. And on my machine it doesn't come up if I watch it only on FB or on YT without starting it on the FB page first.

And also I found a bug on screen saver option. It's to do with using your photos on the "grid" screensaver. I can't change the pictures from the ones I've selected initially, unless I start the whole screensaver -settings thingie in Settings again.

-temppa

 

[dwhynman]

If you have a new iMac why do you feel you need to do a clean install. Unless you are having major problems with your hard rive there is no real reason to d that. Just don't worry about it and download from the app store. Have fun

 

[Lihi]

i just don't feel like having some snow leopard leftovers.
since i don't need to backup anything it's pretty simple and easy to do a clean install.

 

[chandler99]

one big problem with lion for me seems to be its inability to be able to search through files on and external harddrive (TC & NAS).

That coupled with the crash/lockup caused when saving an illustrator file to those drives if the file name already exists.