Installing straight from Leopard 10.5.8?

Question

Installing straight from Leopard 10.5.8?

After a series of very, VERY complicated events, I purchased Snow Leopard but ultimately was unable to install it on my primary machine, an intel based iMac from late 2006. Though I did consult multiple Apple technicians on the phone and in stores, I'm stuck with 10.5.8 as my OS. I ended up using the copy of Snow Leopard on my 2007 MacBook Air. So, my main machine is now two operating systems behind. Is there any way of using the bootable USB thumb drive to install Lion on my Leopard machine, bypassing the Snow Leopard installing?

Thanks!

iMac Intel (Late 2006), Mac OS X (10.6.6), 2GB RAM, 1TB internal space + 4TB total external space

Posted on Jul 22, 2011 8:42 PM

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Answer 1

First Magus

Level 7

21,278 points

Sep 25, 2011 10:28 AM in response to Chris Thurber

Yes you should ha no problems doing that. See the links for help in doing it.

OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433 Lion DiskMaker (US) is a utility that makes the USB install creation easier.

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Answer 2

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Sep 25, 2011 3:27 PM in response to Chris Thurber

The System Requirements for the Lion USB thumb drive listed here include:

"OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended"

I'm not sure, but the USB Lion installer might not install directly over a pre-existing Leopard installation so as to "upgrade" it, as would be the case if you were running Snow Leopard. You might have to erase the Leopard volume first and then do a "clean install" of Lion.

If so, that presumably means first backing up the Leopard installation to a clone or Time Machine backup on an external drive, then booting the Lion thumb drive and using Disk Utility there to erase the internal HD, then installing Lion and hopefully using SetUp Assistant on first boot to migrate over your previous stuff from the backup drive. If you can't use SetUp Assistant or Migration Assistant you'd have to later restore your stuff manually.

As I said, I'm not sure of this. Has anyone actually used Apple's Lion thumb drive to directly install Lion over Leopard?

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