Rebuilding iMac; question re Lion

[cognus]

Greetings friends
I'm new here - been around iLounge a long time. I'm a pc tech among other things, not so much Mac tech since everyone knows that apple products are self-healing

Seriously, I have an iMac, 20", core duo, which I pulled data from for a customer - the drive was non-bootable. Data was ok, as it turned out, other than a few corrupt vids here and there which can probably be fixed. The drive was an older big/hot 3.5" and I shipped it back to the customer to just stash once the data was moved to his macbook.

I will rebuild this iMac with a 2.5 7200rpm hdd, 250gb and want to put Lion on the system. Do I understand correctly that I need to order the dvd/cd disc from the apple store? I poked around there [i have an account, though not setup for an iMac - ipod touch...] it appears the way apple wants me to do it is over the wire but the tutorials I have show a way to option the bios at install so that it assumes the old image is kaput. Which disc do I order and from whence?

thanks for this and the other helpful advice I'll glean from searching here.
gracias
C

 

[monkeybagel]

Do you have any recovery DVDs for it?

Your options are to acquire Snow Leopard, update it to 10.6.6+ and purchase Lion from the App Store for $29.99, or order the Lion USB drive from Apple for $69.99.

 

[Jozone]

I have an iMac, 20", core duo

Thats gonna be a problem, Lion requires Core2Duo+

 

[cognus]

it is this model:
iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 20-Inch (Al) 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (T7700)

Intro Date: August 7, 2007 Disc Date: April 28, 2008
Order No: MA877LL Model No: A1224 (EMC 2133)
Subfamily: Mid-2007 Model ID: iMac7,1
Std. RAM: 1 GB Std. VRAM: 256 MB
Std. HD: 320 GB (7200 RPM) Std. Optical: 8X DL "SuperDrive"
Complete iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 20-Inch (Al) Specs

I'll be adding another 1GB

 

[robgendreau]

Per Apple's site Lion should work on that, with more RAM.

"Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
2GB of memory
OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended)
7GB of available space"

But I'm not sure it's a good idea. Is the RAM maxed out?

Generic Snow Leopard in the Apple Store is only $29; it might be a better fit and let the customer decide whether to upgrade to Lion. You have to install SL in any case to get to Lion.

 

[cognus]

from what I'm reading in many posts, its possible to install w/o leopard. option switches at first run put you to a mode intended for sicko machines, hit the erase function [there's nothing on this drive] and proceed.

as to max ram, it looks like Apple-supported is 4gb, so 2x2gb. some claim it can go 6 ... i don't recall standard modules of 3gb...
will use a friend's macbook to burn a bootable dvd with the image

 

[Taz Mangus]

from what I'm reading in many posts, its possible to install w/o leopard. option switches at first run put you to a mode intended for sicko machines, hit the erase function [there's nothing on this drive] and proceed.

as to max ram, it looks like Apple-supported is 4gb, so 2x2gb. some claim it can go 6 ... i don't recall standard modules of 3gb...
will use a friend's macbook to burn a bootable dvd with the image

Your machine has two memory slots. If you put in one slot 2GB memory stick and the other slot a 1G memory stick, giving you 3GB. Sounds like the max you can go is 4GB + 2GB. Memory is cheap these days, put the max RAM that you can afford in the Mac.

If your customer is using MobileMe Apple is giving away free Snow Leopard DVDs to entice people to upgarde to Lion.

 

[cognus]

good

good tip re mobileme.
thanks a ton