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Braby

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2007
74
0
When installing Leopard on your system, will you have to reformat your drive and lose everything?
 
No, you can simply upgrade the existing installation. There are three options for installing, outlined here.
 
Is it any different? Any missing features?

If not, that's awesome.
 
No, it's exactly the same as a full Erase and Install. Some people prefer to do a full Erase and Install just to make sure they have everything installed exactly as Apple had designed and they don't have any issues carrying over from the old install.

But I and many other people have done plenty of upgrade installs with no issues whatsoever.
 
Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. This is my first time upgrading a new OS on a Mac.
 
I remembered there was a poll here, and most people suggest to do clean install.
 
We've had many threads and much discussion, but no actual polls that I can recall, and certainly no consensus in favor of clean installs.
 
When installing Leopard on your system, will you have to reformat your drive and lose everything?
Reformatting your hard drive or even Archive & Install are radical measures intended to repair vexing problems. These are not intended to be standard practices for upgrades. Unfortunately, a lot of switchers think that necessary procedures for handling Windows are good ideas for handling Macs. They are not. If your computer is behaving well now, then you have about 99.999% certainty that it will behave well after a simple upgrade. The installer will go through a media and file system check as part of the upgrade. When it is done, you will be able to immediately get to work. Those performing more radical procedures will still be futzing with their systems long after you are done.
 
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