Some help and advice re upgrades to iMac 8.1

[markoneswift]

Hello everyone, I'm new here and I need to ask for some help with upgrading two iMac 8.1's at work. They a 2.8 Dual Cores with 500Gb drives, one is on OSX Leopard, the other on Snow Leopard. I'm an IT tech with 20 years' experience in a Windows environment but Mac OSX is still fairly new to me.

I need to bring these two machine into parallel with each other - same OS / app versions etc. What would my upgrade to Mountain Lion be ? Am I correct in thinking L > SL > ML and SL > ML ?

I'm thinking of upgrading the HDDs in these machines - can I take a 'clone' image of the machines as they are and then reimage back to a blank new HDD ( I'm thinking of SSD - any recommendations here ? ) and then upgrade the OS on each after the new drives / reimage. The machines are both on 4Gb of RAM - is there any benefit to taking these to 6Gb ?

Given the scenario of two machines with identical hardware spec but different software versions, could anyone recommend an upgrade path any better / different to what I've outlined here ? Sorry for all the questions but I'm leaving my job soon and I would like to wrap this one job up before I go.

Thanks all !

 

[benwiggy]

Yes, you need to update to Snow Leopard, in order to access the Mac App Store, where you can buy Mountain Lion.

I would definitely max out the RAM to 6Gb. 10.8 uses as much RAM as is available, but more is always better. My 2009 MacBook has 6Gb, which makes running Creative Suite etc just a little bit easier than with 4.

Yes, you can use Disk Utility to make an image of the drive and restore it onto a new SSD. (You'll need to do this while booted to the installer disk or other volume, of course.) You can also use CarbonCopyCloner, a third-party utility.

In a work environment, you'll also need to check that whatever software you're running on Leopard and Snow Leopard will work properly on 10.8, and upgrade to newer versions, if necessary.

 

[markoneswift]

Yes, you need to update to Snow Leopard, in order to access the Mac App Store, where you can buy Mountain Lion.

I would definitely max out the RAM to 6Gb. 10.8 uses as much RAM as is available, but more is always better. My 2009 MacBook has 6Gb, which makes running Creative Suite etc just a little bit easier than with 4.

Yes, you can use Disk Utility to make an image of the drive and restore it onto a new SSD. (You'll need to do this while booted to the installer disk or other volume, of course.) You can also use CarbonCopyCloner, a third-party utility.

In a work environment, you'll also need to check that whatever software you're running on Leopard and Snow Leopard will work properly on 10.8, and upgrade to newer versions, if necessary.

Hi mate thanks a lot for the tips, pretty much what I thought. Can you expand on the disk imaging side of things ? What is Disk Utility and how would I boot to the installer disk ? I don't have any original install media for either of these machines so would I potentially need to use the third party app to do an image ? Would this image be captured to an external USB hard drive ? Thanks again.

 

[benwiggy]

Disk Utility is Apple's bundled ... disk utility.
There's a copy in /Applications/Utilities, but you can't really make an image of the disk while you're running that disk as system.
So you need to be booted from another drive. The installer disks come with a copy of DU, under the Utilities menu.
In DU, go to File > New > New Image from Folder.
Select the whole volume.

I've not used CCC, so don't know if you can use it on the current boot volume. There are lots of instructions for using it online, though.

 

[markoneswift]

OK, thanks for the further info. I think one issue might be that we do not have the original Leopard install media, therefore no other volume to boot from. I'll have a look at the other option of CarbonCopy.