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MidAtlantian2

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 17, 2013
5
0
Hi,

I’m having a problem trying to install Mountain Lion over an existing Snow Leopard. I get a failed install because it cannot create the recovery partition, and I've been down several failed attempts to overcome this.

I do not use RAID, but I have Windows along with multiple OS partitions, so the hard drive is …. non-standard. Apple suggested installing the OS on a blank external disk, and that then the installer would see the recovery partition “somewhere” and “be happy enough to proceed”. When that did not work, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the recovery partition from the newly installed version of OS 10.8 to on the external disk onto my computer’s system partition The installer did not like that either, and failed again.

What I think will work is to copy all of my partitions to external drives, set my internal drive to a single guid partition and copy the system partition back, THEN do the install/upgrade to Mountain Lion, THEN do the games to get Windows and multiple partitions in place, then install Windows, and then copy the other partitions back. I am reasonably confident that I will be able to get all that to work.

My concern is: what happens the next time I need to do a system upgrade, or an “Archive and Install”? Will the installer be just as uncooperative?

Any comments/suggestions welcome!
 
Do you use these other partitions and OS boot drives very often... or are they more for testing? If it is infrequent... can you put them all on an external drive and boot externally when needed? That would keep your primary drive clean.

/Jim
 
Why do I want to have multiple partitions?

Hi,

Flynz4:

I keep all of my "data" on one partition, and photos and music on another. It makes backing up easier, and gives some isolation against corruption of a single partition. And it is a laptop. I do not want to carry an external all of the time.

I've been doing this for a lot of years, and have had no experience to make me regret it.

Cheers,
MidAtlantian2
 
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