Clean Install or Upgrade

When I get my copy of the new version OS X, should I make a clean install or an upgrade?

Teacher

 

I have seen a lot of reports over the years where people have been completely successful with an OS upgrade, but I always see a few reports where things get hosed as well. No one outside of Apple has tested out the install process of Leopard (final build) so the jury is still out.

I prefer clean installs. It ensures that there won't be any conflicts and you get to start with a clean slate. I would highly recommend it if you have been running the same install for several months or a year. It could probably use a clean up. If doing a clean install is too much of a hassle then I would suggest backing up everything important to an external hard drive (which you should have been doing anyways ). Get all of your docs, media files, export your bookmarks, etc. Try the upgrade and see if it works for you. Worse case is that you'll have some conflicts that you may be able to resolve and if not you can always do a clean install.

 

In Windows world clean install is best. This should be also valid for MacOS (since it's FreeBSD based)

 

Clean install for sure

 

Clean install it is! Thanks

 

When you get to the "Installation Type" step, look for the "Customize" button. You can easily save valuable disk space .

 

I am also running Bootcamp and Fusion. Will all of that get wiped out and do I have to reinstall those programs?

 

You'll need to reinstall Fusion. Boot Camp (the Windows partition) should be OK. So you won't need to reinstall Windows.

When you perform a Clean Install, the entire OS X partition is erased. But Windows is on a different partition so it should be intact.

 

I love this Mac stuff after dealing with PC's for the last 20+ years. Everything is so much easier!

 

You're kidding me. At least for this issue, you're still doing the same thing as you would with Windows. Your euphoria seems misplaced, at least in *this* thread. I would much prefer to do an upgrade installation and I would be much more impressed if someone could confirm a successful attempt.

 

Ask and you shall recieve.
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/23/mac-os-x-10-5-leopard-first-impressions/

 

Well it *can* be easier to do a clean install since most of OSX's applications are prepackaged so it's just a matter of dragging them all over to the App folder instead of installing them one at a time like in Windows.

That said, almost all of the mainstream OS X programs have released new updates for Leopard compatibility (Omniweb just released theirs today if anyone's interested) or are about to, so you'll probably end up just doing fresh installs of each application anyway, so there wouldn't be much difference with Windows on that front. There are also some very system-integrated software that have not yet been upgraded and will not work in Leopard: Orbicule's Undercover comes to mind - it won't break your system if you do an upgrade install, but it just won't run, so be extra careful with your MB or MBP I guess if you were relying on this. They're working on v2.0 though.

I doubt there will be any system-breaking issues with an upgrade install. Hopefully we don't run into the existing-software bugs that Vista had (such as pre-installing MS Defender, failure to update windows graphics, etc.). Leopard isn't nearly as huge a step over Tiger as Vista was over XP.

However, I would also be interested in seeing someone do an upgrade installation with absolutely no loss of performance compared to a clean install. Vista tends to run quite a bit slower doing an upgrade install as opposed to a clean install.

Similarly, currently there are still compatibility issues with VMWare Tools and Boot Camp and the settings shared by them depending on how you update each. I would hope these would be resolved without the need to do a fresh install of Windows in the Boot Camp partition at the very least - but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

I did an upgrade on my brother's Macbook pro. Leopard installs a new bootcamp. If you want to have the new drivers but dont want to delete the whole partition...is it possible?

Can I just make a bootcamp cd and reinstall the drivers?

 

From Apple's OS X Leopard features - Boot Camp webpage:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

So I'm assuming that you don't need to repartition or reinstall Windows.

EDIT: Here's an Apple Support Article on it. Simple enough.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15553.html

 

I upgraded both machines. It went flawlessly and everything works fine.

 

ok ive got a question about installing. when i get leopard it should hopefully be the same time i get my new hard drive, so will i just be able to put the HD in unformatted, and will the leopard installation handle all the formating, or should i format it to Journaled b4 i install it?

 

Leopard will format the new drive. It just works!