Problems installing Leopard

[xJulianx]

Firstly I'll quickly tell you my specs:

MacBook CD 1.83Ghz
1.25GB RAM
200GB Toshiba HD

So I popped in the Leopard disk with intentions of doing an archive and install, but when the wizard gets to the part where you choose install location, there is an exclamation mark over my hard drive and the installer asks me to re-partition my drive to GUI (i think?) format.

Is there anyway around this that you may know of as I really don't want to do a clean install and lose all of my files/settings etc.

 

[taybo20]

do you currently have a partition that is running windows?

 

[xJulianx]

do you currently have a partition that is running windows?

Nope, I have just a single partition running 10.4.10.

 

[cyclingplatypus]

Do you have an external drive?

If so then connect it, open up disk utilities and click on partition and click on the options bubble, switch that to GUID let it does its thing.

Download CCC and clone your main drive.

Since you formatted the external to GUID you can now select it to be Startup Disk in System Preferences. Do this and restart.

It will restart using the external drive and now repeat the above process (reformat the partition and clone the external drive to the internal).

Go back to System Preferences and select to boot from the main internal drive.

No need to do a complete reinstall and lose your files, I did this (all but the upgrade to 10.5 which I did yesterday) a few weeks ago and it worked flawlessly.

 

[xJulianx]

Can you be selective with what CCC clones? Only I have used 111.31GB on my internal drive, and my external is only 80GB in size...

Many thanks.

 

[cyclingplatypus]

You can't be selective with a clone, I'd suggest burning some stuff to DVD and getting it down to under 80GB or getting a larger external drive (this is great for Time Machine).