Upgrading Leopard to Snow Leopard, will this wipe out my Mac? [EDITED WITH IMAGES]

[ISJB]

This is to put Snow Leopard on my Macbook but I can't put CDs in it and I don't have a big enough USB, so I found this method:

I have a MacBook Pro, but I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard in order to get Lion. However, my CD driver (thing where you insert CDs) is broken and I don't have a big enough USB or external HD. I found a way to do it without needing any external hardware though.

It's done by:
1. Creating a partition of your Hard Drive (using Disk Utility)

2. Copying the Snow Leopard .dmg to it; making sure "Erase Destination" is checked (does this mean that the partition will be deleted?)

3. Booting the installer: "Once you have a Snow Leopard Installer partition set up, restart your computer and hold the 'Option' (or alt) key at boot up and select 'Snow Leopard Installer' from the list. The Snow Leopard Installer should successfully boot up and you should be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard!"

Will this be a clean install (delete everything in my Mac) or will it be only an upgrade (I won't lose anything)

If you'd like to read the whole explanation, you may check it out here:
http://superuser.com/questions/35108/how-do-i-upgrade-to-snow-leopard-without-a-cd-drive

 

[r0k]

I think "erase" is referring to the 10 GB partition you are creating for the SL installer. Do you have Macintosh HDD backed up? I would say that is much more urgent than fiddling around with Lion. Get yourself a usb HDD and back up Macintosh HDD using Carbon Copy Cloner (free/donation). You can also create a partition to use for the installer at the same time. Under no circumstances would I risk my Macintosh HDD the way you are doing. I tried something like this on my wife's Mac mini. Her Macintosh HD simply vanished. I tried to restore from Time Machine but the backup (done via wifi to a Time Capsule) was corrupted and unusable. Finally I brought everything back from Crashplan (paid). It turns out I probably could have purchased a data recovery program to get her data back but I didn't have to because I had a backup of a backup. That is what you need. Hit the pause button while you get a backup solution in place. Lion can wait.