quickie snow leopard upgrade tips

I’ve upgraded two of our three macs over the weekend, using two different methods. Both worked flawlessly out of the box. Here’s some of the “how”

The Full Monty.

I make a habit of upgrading and replacing the drives on our macbooks every 12 months or so, and this has timed well with OS releases from Apple. This time I went to Amazon and bought two 500GB WD drives, and two NextStar CX cases. I tend to replace the drives for two reasons: it’s the one part of the system that, if it dies, we will have a hard time replacing the contents. If RAM goes, I can replace it and reboot. Same with a motherboard. HDD’s, not so much. It’s worked so far. The second reason is that it forces me to do a OS upgrade, or at least a clean up, every 12 months, which is a good thing. It also allows for the general expansion of data (usually photos) that we have.

I’ve had a few of the cheaper cases (around the £6 price point) and generally they are crap, so I went with a more expensive brand that I know work well. If NextStar still sold Firewire/USB combo cases, I would have gone with them, but sadly, they are all USB/eSATA, which isn’t much use to me.

I went with 5400rpm drives this time for a couple of reasons: heat, and power. I don’t need the extra speed that the 7200rpm drives provide (the previous drives were 7200rpm, 320GB drives), but getting the extra battery life, and reduced heat output, of the 5400rpm models was worth it. Keep in mind that I don’t edit video, so if you do, the 7200′s might be better for you. I also ordered these from Amazon – not a affiliate selling thru amazon – as last time the 320′s came very poorly packaged, and I think Leonie’s machine makes strange noises because of this. The ones from amazon could have literally been thrown across the room without damage, which makes me a lot more confident, as couriers tend to do exactly that.

Total cost: about £80 per machine.

Steps:

• First thing I did was backup. I use SuperDuper! and have it scheduled to run weekly, so I just fired it manually.
• Next, I swapped out the drive. On the macbook (white ones), this is easy, and takes me about 5 mins.
• I then booted up the machine off the DVD (hold down C to boot from disk), partitioned the disk using Disk Utility, and installed Snow Leopard.
• While it was installing, I put the old drive into the USB caddy.
• Once Snow Leopard was finished, it asks about keyboards, and if you want to transfer your settings from another Mac. At this point, say yes (from another drive/volume on this mac), but before you click continue, plug in the USB caddy with your old drive.
• After it inspects the USB drive, move over everything (assuming you want everything)
• Go get a coffee or watch a movie. I moved about 180GB of data, and it took about 2.5 hours.
• The machine finally reboots, and you should be about where it was before you installed – except with a new OS under the hood. Easy.

The list of apps I had to “fix” was short:

• VMWare Fusion needed to be reinstalled, as it installs a driver.
• iStat Menu’s doesn’t work with Snow Leopard yet.
• Thats it. Everything else, so far, has just worked.

So I now have a 320GB drive to use as an offsite backup for these machines.

The Half Nelson

The other Mac we have is a Mac Mini. This is my Virtual Machine machine,  and also our central repository for iTunes music. I don’t have a good way to back this machine up (tho the music is backed up), but all the content is in other places if I needed to recreate it.

So this one just gets the upgrade treatment.

• Insert Snow Leopard DVD
• Keep hitting next until it tells you it’s working for 45 mins or so
• Let it reboot
• Presto: new OS

Couldn’t really be easier. Again, I had to reinstall VMWare Fusion, which takes about 40 seconds, but other than that…..

All up, this isn’t a huge upgrade from Apple – more a VERY extended service pack, but they made it so trivial – and cheap -  to upgrade the base OS that it’s really worth doing.