Upgrading Hardrive/ Re-installing Snow Leopard Macbook Air

A better plan would be to use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your internal disk to a usb attached disk.

Then after replacing your internal, you can boot from the usb disk clone and clone it back to the internal drive.

CCC available here:

http://www.bombich.com/

If you want to install Snow Leopard on your Air, Remote Install OS X is designed to accomplish that:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2129

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/21219.html

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1777

You need another computer with an optical drive, but it can even be Windows: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL112

After Snow Leopard is installed, it will present the option to migrate your account and settings from the TM backup.

Documentation on CCC is available from their site, but it's very straightforward.

First download CCC (free) then attach a usb drive formatted GUID partition table / Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

with enough capacity to hold your internal drive and Clone to the external.

Boot the external drive to test by holding down the Option key at the startup tone. The boot manager will give you the option to boot from the internal or the external clone. Once you've checked it out for proper operation, shutdown and replace the drive.

After the replacement, boot with the Option key again from the external clone and format the new drive using Disk Utility (if required) and use CCC to copy the clone to the internal drive.

I use CCC on a regular basis as do many here.

A faster way if you have the proper bits and pieces is to install the new drive in a USB enclosure, and then just clone your current drive direclty to the new one. Then swap drives and you are good to go. Have done this many times when upgrading laptops but getting the correct enclosure for your MBA may be the main drawback.

My problem is slightly different.

My hard disk died, and I am replacing it with an SSD.

The SSD is unusual in that it has to be a 1.8" size with a ZIF PATA connector.

So it is not easy to simply connect up to anything apart from the Macbook Air (Internally).

I have a remote disk available -connected via ethernet (Windows 7).

I think it would be much easier if I could copy the Snow Leaopard Install Disks onto a USB.

Can I do this?

If so, How?

Suggest you post this as a new question. It will get more attention, and will not interrupt the conversation on this thread.

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_air

I solved this. The new SSD connector layout was a different way round to the original drive. So I turned it over.

I solved this by

formatting an 8GB USB

creating a GUID partition using Disk Utitlity

Creating a Install USB disk and using that to boot from.

(NB you have to keep pressing "C" while booting for up to 3 minutes for it to recongnise the USB)