Upgrading to snow leopard

I'm assuming that the original HDD (now known as HDD1) has the OS and Apps on it. I'm also assuming that you'll want to install SnowLeopard onto HDD1.

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Are there any OS's on these drives (HDD2,3,4)? What's on them, just data?

Personally, I wouldn't bother with disconnecting HDD2,3,4, but if you're paranoid, just disconnecting the SATA cables should be enough. I don't know if the dangling cables can short anything, but you probably don't want them flopping around.

You can clone HDD1 using SuperDuper to whatever other drive you want. If something goes wrong during the upgrade, you can clone from the backup back onto HDD1 using SuperDuper. No problems.

A couple of other issues. Make sure you read up on the Snow Leopard Guest Account Data Loss issue. If you don't have any guest accounts, then no worries.

Another thing. Here's what I noticed after upgrading from Tiger to SL. When I plugged in my external HDDs to my Macbook, there was all kinds of wierd activity on the external HDDs. I thought my drives were being killed by SL. Turns out that Spotlight was indexing the drives. I think SL has to reindex the drives after upgrading. Also, I made sure that Spotlight didn't index my SuperDuper back-up as it would take forever.

Lastly, make sure you check to see if you have any files that got lost or deleted in the upgrade. I didn't notice and files disappearing, but most of my Address Book contacts disappeared. Apparently this problem happens enough that there's an Apple Knowledge Base for it. I was able to pull the proper files from my SuperDuper back-up and get Address Book back up and running.

 

As far as the possibility of screwing up HDD2,3,4, I think it's small. I've never heard anyone having issues with an OS install wiping out data drives.

As for the fresh install vs. upgrade ... it's more of a personal choice. For me, I like to do a fresh upgrade, but it could be my experience with Mac OS 6-9, plus Windows that is conditioning me to feel a benefit to a clean install.

For my wife's Macbook, I did an Upgrade mainly because she has her desktop and application set up just the way she likes it. I'm not familiar enough with her set-up to be able to get it completely back the way she likes it. So I did an upgrade.

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Just remember to disable the guest account (if not already) if you do an upgrade.

 

Go fresh, no question. Use disk utility to erase your boot drive. Then install snow leopard. We have lots of 08 Mac Pros, snow leopard works great, no problems and spending the time to do virgin installs was worth it.