Clean Install Lion...

Yes

The long answer is that you will need to do a clean

install of Snow Leopard and then update that via App Store.

Until Lion actually gets released, any other method that

has been stated on threads here and on the internet are

pure speculation.

This is helpful.

Can I also ask, as I've never done this before, when I perform a clean installation; will I need to re-install all my applications - iWork, MS Office, etc. As these applications require a product-key (at least for MS Office), if it requires me to re-install and activate the software, I'll hit a road-block as I have already used up all the licenses.

Thanks in advance.

Why do you want to go through all that?

That's rarely necessary, and rarely accomplishes anything (well, nothing good). 😉

OSX is not Windoze; upgrading "in place" does not leave all sorts of stuff behind, or have a negative impact on your Mac's performance.

Apple removed the Erase and Install option, effective with Snow Leopard.

Any application that is not pre bundled and not backed up to hard drive will need to be reinstalled from scratch if you erase and install. There is no such thing as a "clean install." Clone backups at least through Snow Leopard have allowed restores through clones and/or Migration Assistant. The status of the Migration Assistant, and any operating system license limitations are still unknown with Lion since it has not been released. We can't prognosticate on this board, if you read terms of use. Hopefully by the end of this month, Lion will be released and those mysteries will be solved, since Apple announced it will be here this month on http://www.apple.com/macosx/ They have not said what date it will be available. See my FAQ* on clones: http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

It remains to be seen how true clones are with Lion.

I have a similar problem as I only have Leopard, which come with my MacBook package, but not Snow Leopard. That means I have to purchase Snow Leopard and then purchase Lion...

Pondini, that's not quite so. Take the Migration Assistant for example. Let's say you purchased a new Mac and used Migration Assistant to restore everything from a Time Machine drive. The start-up time increases alarmingly compared to not migrating your applications and content and manually reinstalling applications and transferring your content.

Pahu, have you done a clean install yourself? What type of Mac do you use? How many secs does it take Lion to start up? I'm experiencing a significantly slowed-down start-up after updating to Lion.

Harpo Marx wrote:

Pondini, that's not quite so. Take the Migration Assistant for example. Let's say you purchased a new Mac and used Migration Assistant to restore everything from a Time Machine drive. The start-up time increases alarmingly compared to not migrating your applications and content and manually reinstalling applications and transferring your content.

That may be true in some cases, such as, if you have leftover parts of apps you no longer use, but that keep starting and failing endlessly. But it's not common, and should be fixable by deleting the leftovers. See the Application Installation or Removal problems section in the blue box of OSX Log Files.

Done. I have asked my friend for his SL DVD for a clean installation and install Lion on top of it. I guess this should be the fastest way to solve my problem....

Anyway, thanks for you all!!

The way hard drives work is they are the fastest at retrieving data first applied in the outer hot bands near the edges of the platters and gets slower and slower on data as the drive begins to fill up more towards the center of the platters where the sectors get smaller.

So you can see if your a hard drive head reading and writing data, you don't have to move as often on the outer sectors. Thus reading and writing is faster which results in a substantial performance gain provided data that can take advantage of that speed is written there. Like the OS and programs which are used all the time.

User data on the other hand fluctuates a lot and isn't used all the time, so it's best on the slower inner sectors.

OS X employs a technique of writing 2GB files and smaller as one complete piece without breaking up the file if it can. This is why Mac's don't have to be de-fragmented as often as Windows machines. But that doesn't mean de-fragmentation and de-optimization doesn't occur, which it most certainly does over time.

More advanced users who understand this want to do a fresh install when they upgrade their operating system because it can coincide with a lot of other major decisions they have to make, like upgrading third party programs, cleaning house and so forth. So they want to do a fresh install of everything to have a fast computer again.

OS X always has the ability to wipe a drive and reinstall the operating system, this option has never been taken away in Snow Leopard, it's in the Disk Utility located in the Utilities menu because less savvy users were wiping their entire hard drives of all their data without realizing what they were doing.

A better method was employed in 10.6 that allowed just OS X itself to be overwritten with a version from the boot disk without deleting the users programs and data. So the standard Erase and Install method was naturally removed.

With OS X Lion there is a Recovery Partition, which if one holds Command R when rebooting will allow for disk repairs, reinstalling the OS and wiping the boot partition etc.

And with newer Mac's that are coming out, even if you replace your hard drive, as long as you have a broadband internet connection it will connect to Apple's servers and install OS X Lion via the Internet Recovery.

http://macdailynews.com/2011/07/20/apple-debuts-lion-recovery-lets-users-repair- disks-or-reinstall-mac-os-x-lion-without-physical-disc/

How that works remains to be seen.

Performing a clean install of Lion is easy once you create a Lion Boot Disc. How do I create a Lion Boot Disc, you ask? That's easy too! Just follow these instructions: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/18/make-an-os-x-lion-boot-disc/

The fact is that the Lion installer is packaged around a bootable disk image that can easily be burned to a standard 4.7GB DVD. With the boot disk you can run disk utility to erase your Mac, and then clean install just like you could with every other version of Mac OS X. Just don't forget to backup all your data!!! 😉