I put off upgrading the operating system on my MacBook Pro from Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) until I had free time over the holidays. These are my brief notes about how I performed the upgrade.
I needed to clean up the cruft that had accumulated in my system, and I needed to repartition my internal hard drive to remove a Windows partition and expand the partition devoted to OS X to the entire drive. Because repartitioning my internal drive was going to wipe out all data, I wanted to be very careful in having a complete copy of my old system before performing the upgrade.
I followed the upgrade instructions provided in Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard, written by Joe Kissell. This e-book is well worth the $10 because it provides detailed advice on every step of upgrading to Snow Leopard.
In brief, I performed the following steps:
- I cleaned up my directories and files.
- I removed software that I no longer use.
- I made a record on my backup computer of all license keys in case something went wrong and I needed to completely reinstall my applications.
- I made a complete bootable backup of my entire internal drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and I tested the backup by booting from it.
- I booted my MacBook Pro from the install DVD and used Disk Utility from the DVD to remove the old partitions and create a partition spanning the entire internal drive.
- I installed Snow Leopard.
- I used the installer’s Migration Assistant to transfer my old applications and files from the backup drive.
- I ran Software Update to update the system to OS X 10.6.2.
- I created a fresh backup from Snow Leopard using Time Machine, preserving my Leopard backup for the time being on a separate partition of my external drive.
The result was an upgrade to Snow Leopard that is, so far, working with zero problems.
My biggest difficulty was in getting a complete backup of my internal drive onto my external drive. I have a Western Digital My Passport Studio 320 GB external drive, and during the weeks I have owned the drive, I have experienced many failures in the backup process where the computer loses its connection with the external drive. Yesterday, I experienced this problem using either the FireWire 800 or the FireWire 400 cable that came with the drive. I decided to try the USB 2.0 cable, and that has worked well so far, with no noticeable loss in speed writing to the disk. In case the problem was caused by bad sectors on the external drive, I erased the 120-GB partition I had created on the drive by writing zeros once using Disk Utility. If I remember correctly, this step will identify bad sectors on the drive and cause the drive to mark them not to be used.
Carbon Copy Cloner was so useful that I made a $25 contribution.
