Jul
21
Maccast Members 090 – Installing Lion
Written by: Adam Christianson
Categories: Maccast Members, Podcast
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Episode 090. OS X Lion is here and in this episode I cover how I did my upgrade. I did what I’m calling an “extreme” clean install and I will cover just how I did that. I’ll also give you my first impressions of the new OS and offer a couple of early tips and tricks along the way.
Maccast Members
The audio for this episode is available to Maccast Members. Sign-up or log in by visiting the Maccast Member site.
Whew! Sounds to me like maybe you worked too hard. I considered a clean install a little bit but strongly decided against it this time around. For two reasons:
1) For me a critical part of ‘clean install’ is to start over with a fresh hard disk. Factory fresh, with zero miles on it. A reformat and a pseudo-clean install still isn’t clean because the HD still has that mileage on it. Its firmware may have been silently sparing out bad sectors, etc. That stuff still counts against you even though you reformatted.
Also, part of my clean install ritual is to put the factory fresh HD on the bench and do a Spinrite “comprehensive” (aka level 4) run. That validates every last sector on that puppy, so it gets its life off to a good start. (This is PRIOR to formatting it as a Mac disk.)
Currently my Macs do not have user-servicable HDs, so this was impractical.
2) This time, Apple only paved one road. A long time ago, we were presented with more choices–(a) upgrade, (b) archive and upgrade, and (c) clean. They are now only paving one road so I didn’t try to fight it. I caved. Trying to do a ‘clean’ install w/o an Apple-recommended pathway creates a whole new set of issues that I didn’t want to think about–most especially since I would not be starting with a fresh and validated HD anyway.
Glad it all worked out for you!
I too took the easy route this time and just updated. The whole process from downloading to complete install took me about 1:35. Pretty dang good if you ask me. Since then, I’ve been running Lion without any hiccups. Looks like the future is going to be paved with quick OS updates for me from now on.
I was to waiting for a post of this sort
Thanks for the notes on “getting ready” too, Adam
However there is no hyperlink to the third party sites you mentioned on the show like AppFresh (sp?). There is an underlined item in the html version of the notes, but it doesn’t click through for me. Do I need a special URL?