This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.
I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.
I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.
That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.
I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.
This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.
I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?
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Once lion is up there you can boot from some recovery thingy and install lion from scratch if you need it. Just press alt during post to see the option.
arnan
are you sure?
You can also select the disk to install to during the Lion Installer. So if you are using a Mac Pro or can attach the new drive via an external case, or even boot off another drive (say a bootable USB disk) then you can reinstall to the other disk from there. Or use the Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple to make a bootable USB drive.
Its really worth having a clean bootable OS on an external drive. I have a Lacie disk with Lion and Snow Leopard bootable OS’s, along with a copy of the SL install disk for just such occasions.