Installing Lion clean on hard drive with multiple partitions

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Level 2

477 points

Installing Lion clean on hard drive with multiple partitions

I have a spring 2008 24" iMac running Snow Leopard.

I am about to put a new 2TB hard drive in it and after I do that I want to do a clean install of Lion on it.

I do not want to upgrade my Snow Leopard install to Lion. I will keep it on my back up drive as a fallback incase of serious workflow incompatiblities with the new OS.

For my workflow I create and use multiple partitions (Mac OS, Windows and multiple HFS+ for data) on my hard drive and I have seen that Lion creates it's own hidden recovery partition as well for the recovery functionality.

My questions are:

1) Will I have issues running Lion on a partition on a hard drive with multiple partitions that have different file systems?

2) If I install Lion into one of these partitions will it create it's recovery partition within the space of the partition it is being installed into?

3) I will be creating a clean install by downloading Lion using the App Store and then burning an installer DVD using instructions I found elsewhere and then using that to do the install on the new drive. Is that the best route to take?

All my current data I will have on a backup external hard drive and after I complete the Lion install on the new larger drive I will manually reinstall all my software and move my data back from my backup drive to the new drive one partition at a time except of course for OS partition. I keep all my real user data outside of that partition anyway.

Posted on Feb 29, 2012 6:00 PM

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Answer 1

Light Speed Author

Level 2

477 points

Mar 3, 2012 4:39 PM in response to Light Speed

Thanks for the help!

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Answer 2

Lanny

Level 6

13,183 points

Mar 3, 2012 4:58 PM in response to Light Speed

1. Generally, no, but there are install issues reported for those with existing bootcamp partitions.

2. No, there is no such thing as a partition inside of a partition. It will be an additional partition.

3. Just put a copy of the installer on your external drive and keep a copy on your external drive in a location outside of the application folder. A DVD installer will be extremely slow.

It's much easier to to use Setup Assistant at the end of an OS install than to use Migration Assistant or to copy data after the fact. IMHO

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Answer 3

Mar 3, 2012 5:05 PM in response to Light Speed

I believe this article answers most of your questions.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

or possibly

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649

You will most likely run into the error message that "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk" if you have multiple partitions set up, especially if they were not set up using Bootcamp and/or have serveral different file systems.

You can confirm that the Recovery Partition will not be installed by checking Disk Utility for your current partition map scheme.

This is most definitely not the end of the world as it is quite easy to create an external Recovery disk.

1) No, you shouldn't have issues running Lion, but Recovery HD will not be created.

2) No, and in your case it doesn't sound like it will be installed on your internal drive at all.

3) Yes. If you begin with an empty partition, then install Lion that would be considered a clean install.

Hope that helps.

Autumn

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