Upgrading To Leopard - Part III: Erase, Install, Update and Migrate
December 14, 2007 - 9:47am — Todd Howard
Let's finish up with this brief discussion of the things to think about before making the jump to Leopard. If you haven’t seen the first two parts of the discussion on upgrading to Leopard, you can read Part I and Part II before reading this post.
Your next step is going to be erasing your old boot drive—the one you want to install Leopard onto. While still in disk utility, click on the Erase tab, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the volume format drop down menu. You can also name your new drive at this point if you like. Check the “Install Mac OS 9 Drivers” box only if you ever intend to create a Mac OS 9 partition on this drive and will need to boot up from it, and click the security options button. I recommend clicking “Zero Out Data” button—please do read what all of these security options are and make an alternate, informed choice if zeroing the data won’t cut it for you. Click OK, and then click Erase in the main window. This will take an hour or more to write zeroes to your hard drive. Normal erasure (without zeroing, or the like) merely flags all the existing data blocks as “OK to be written over” but the data is still on the drive. Zeroing Out all data actually takes every 1 and 0 bit on the drive and flips them all to 0. Thus, truly erasing the drive.
Once the process has completed, you can Quit Disk Utility, and then run the Mac OS X Leopard installer. Just follow the steps though the process, it’s very self explanatory, and will yield you a repaired, clean, zeroed hard drive, with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard installed. Once the computer restarts, you will be treated to a snazzy welcome sequence, and then be asked to register your software, and create your account.
For your account, you’ll want to choose a name and password that you will ALWAYS remember, and a short name that you like looking at, as many things in the system will reflect these choices going forward. I usually use my full name Todd Howard and for my shortname I usually use toddhoward, all one word, all lowercase. You can’t have caps or spaces in your short name, so come up with something good. ALso, if you have several computers in the home or office, you’ll be much better off if each one has a unique name, because once you start connecting computers over the network, it can get confusing if all the user accounts—or some of them anyway—are the same.
Before you will end up at your new Leopard desktop, there will be a few more questions to answer. Answer the questions about your email address and your internet access to the best of your ability, and if you don’t know an answer, you can usually skip through them and come back to this later when configuring your system manually.
Once you reach the desktop, before you even start fiddling with anything, you may want to make sure your system software reflects the latest version available from Apple. Choose System Preferences from the dock, and click on Software Update. Click Check now, and install any updates that are presented. Only Apple software that is specifically made for this system by Apple will come up in this window, so there is no need to be concerned about what you are downloading. Once they are installed, you may need to restart, and once you do you will be ready to start installing your software applications like iLife, iWork, Final Cut Studio or Logic Studio, The Adobe Suite and so on.
You will also want to visit the websites for ALL of the companies that make any of the shareware, freeware or commercially downloadable software applications that you use. Almost every application out there now has a “Leopard compatible version” available, and you will need this MOST recent version for the app to run in Leopard. Anything older could really mess things up for you on your new pristine install. Companies like Barebones that make BBEdit and Yojimbo, Red Sweater Software that make MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich, Coda from Panic, Toast Titanium from Roxio - these companies all have Leopard versions of their software - or updates to the CDs you already have. It’s best to make a list of all of the apps you use and visit the website for each one. In fact, you can even try typing in something like “Coda Leopard Compatible” or “MarsEdit Leopard Compatible” into your google search field to be directed directly to the page where the download is. Do not simply drag old applications over from your cloned drive, this could be a big mistake. You ought to run a legitimate installer for every application that you intend to use on Leopard. This is my advice to you.
Once your apps are all installed, and you have run Software Update from System Preferences one more time (keep running it until it says “your software is fully up to date”) then you are done with that phase. Next, you will have to bring over your data and documents from the cloned drive into your new system. There are so many possible variations on how this could be for you, that it’s impossible for me to run through it all. You can move things like your iTunes Library and iPhoto Library directly into the equivalent location on the new install from the old one, you can go to “import mailboxes” in the File Menu in Mail and point to the mailboxes in your Mail application on the clone drive. You will need to consult the developer’s documentation for instructions on where the data files for your applications are kept so that what you want to move them over for each app from your clone, you know where to go to get them, and where to put them in Leopard for import. Also, look to the web and in the iTunes podcast directory for some really in depth advice on migrating data from older Macs or from Windows computers into Leopard. There are so many ways to do this properly that I could not possibly cover it all here. That doesn’t mean you should just “give it a shot” though, definitely do a little research. Also, don’t let the word research scare you off from doing this. Google is your friend. So is the Apple Discussions forum.
Finally, I would now recommend (if you have the external drive space to do it) to run Carbon Copy Cloner on your clean pristine fully installed and updated Leopard disk before you do anything to it, and you’ll always know you have a clean clone of a Leopard system that you can restore to Any Drive You Like, and you won’t have to repeat all these steps again for a long, long time. I hope you find this overview of upgrading to Leopard useful, and please remember, do a little more research and a little reading online about the particulars of your migration path, and you’ll see that almost every issue and problem under the sun has already happened to someone else who’s been willing to post a question or written something on their weblog that will help you make the right decision for yourself.
Let's finish up with this brief discussion of the things to think about before making the jump to Leopard. If you haven’t seen the first two parts of the discussion on upgrading to Leopard, you can read Part I and Part II before reading this post.
Your next step is going to be erasing your old boot drive—the one you want to install Leopard onto. While still in disk utility, click on the Erase tab, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the volume format drop down menu. You can also name your new drive at this point if you like. Check the “Install Mac OS 9 Drivers” box only if you ever intend to create a Mac OS 9 partition on this drive and will need to boot up from it, and click the security options button. I recommend clicking “Zero Out Data” button—please do read what all of these security options are and make an alternate, informed choice if zeroing the data won’t cut it for you. Click OK, and then click Erase in the main window. This will take an hour or more to write zeroes to your hard drive. Normal erasure (without zeroing, or the like) merely flags all the existing data blocks as “OK to be written over” but the data is still on the drive. Zeroing Out all data actually takes every 1 and 0 bit on the drive and flips them all to 0. Thus, truly erasing the drive.
Once the process has completed, you can Quit Disk Utility, and then run the Mac OS X Leopard installer. Just follow the steps though the process, it’s very self explanatory, and will yield you a repaired, clean, zeroed hard drive, with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard installed. Once the computer restarts, you will be treated to a snazzy welcome sequence, and then be asked to register your software, and create your account.
For your account, you’ll want to choose a name and password that you will ALWAYS remember, and a short name that you like looking at, as many things in the system will reflect these choices going forward. I usually use my full name Todd Howard and for my shortname I usually use toddhoward, all one word, all lowercase. You can’t have caps or spaces in your short name, so come up with something good. ALso, if you have several computers in the home or office, you’ll be much better off if each one has a unique name, because once you start connecting computers over the network, it can get confusing if all the user accounts—or some of them anyway—are the same.
Before you will end up at your new Leopard desktop, there will be a few more questions to answer. Answer the questions about your email address and your internet access to the best of your ability, and if you don’t know an answer, you can usually skip through them and come back to this later when configuring your system manually.
Once you reach the desktop, before you even start fiddling with anything, you may want to make sure your system software reflects the latest version available from Apple. Choose System Preferences from the dock, and click on Software Update. Click Check now, and install any updates that are presented. Only Apple software that is specifically made for this system by Apple will come up in this window, so there is no need to be concerned about what you are downloading. Once they are installed, you may need to restart, and once you do you will be ready to start installing your software applications like iLife, iWork, Final Cut Studio or Logic Studio, The Adobe Suite and so on.
You will also want to visit the websites for ALL of the companies that make any of the shareware, freeware or commercially downloadable software applications that you use. Almost every application out there now has a “Leopard compatible version” available, and you will need this MOST recent version for the app to run in Leopard. Anything older could really mess things up for you on your new pristine install. Companies like Barebones that make BBEdit and Yojimbo, Red Sweater Software that make MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich, Coda from Panic, Toast Titanium from Roxio - these companies all have Leopard versions of their software - or updates to the CDs you already have. It’s best to make a list of all of the apps you use and visit the website for each one. In fact, you can even try typing in something like “Coda Leopard Compatible” or “MarsEdit Leopard Compatible” into your google search field to be directed directly to the page where the download is. Do not simply drag old applications over from your cloned drive, this could be a big mistake. You ought to run a legitimate installer for every application that you intend to use on Leopard. This is my advice to you.
Once your apps are all installed, and you have run Software Update from System Preferences one more time (keep running it until it says “your software is fully up to date”) then you are done with that phase. Next, you will have to bring over your data and documents from the cloned drive into your new system. There are so many possible variations on how this could be for you, that it’s impossible for me to run through it all. You can move things like your iTunes Library and iPhoto Library directly into the equivalent location on the new install from the old one, you can go to “import mailboxes” in the File Menu in Mail and point to the mailboxes in your Mail application on the clone drive. You will need to consult the developer’s documentation for instructions on where the data files for your applications are kept so that what you want to move them over for each app from your clone, you know where to go to get them, and where to put them in Leopard for import. Also, look to the web and in the iTunes podcast directory for some really in depth advice on migrating data from older Macs or from Windows computers into Leopard. There are so many ways to do this properly that I could not possibly cover it all here. That doesn’t mean you should just “give it a shot” though, definitely do a little research. Also, don’t let the word research scare you off from doing this. Google is your friend. So is the Apple Discussions forum.
Finally, I would now recommend (if you have the external drive space to do it) to run Carbon Copy Cloner on your clean pristine fully installed and updated Leopard disk before you do anything to it, and you’ll always know you have a clean clone of a Leopard system that you can restore to Any Drive You Like, and you won’t have to repeat all these steps again for a long, long time. I hope you find this overview of upgrading to Leopard useful, and please remember, do a little more research and a little reading online about the particulars of your migration path, and you’ll see that almost every issue and problem under the sun has already happened to someone else who’s been willing to post a question or written something on their weblog that will help you make the right decision for yourself.
Comments
Post new comment