Installing Mountain Lion Without Bootable Backup

Hi Barney. Thanks for reply. I'm not worried about my data. Stock sales, tax returns,papers,spreadsheets,journal articles, in other words, anything involving numbers or words as pertain to my personal or professional life are backed up every day at 3 a.m. by MOZY. Once a week I move such things to drop box and I have 2 16GB memory sticks.

When I installed Lion, my data was protected but apps no longer worked, battery time went from 7 hours to 3 hours, I couldn't find some apps and some folders. Pictures,tv shows,videos and movies I purchased at I Tunes and elsewhere that I really didn't care about but would have been nice to have kept were gone.

By the time 10.7.4 came out,almost all non-I Tunes issues (except the battery) were resolved. Virtually everyone at these boards insisted i should have done a complete backup and clean install which I still want to do but this seemingly simple task is becoming a royal pain in the butt. Until Lion, I had downloaded every new OS just like Apple says to with no problems. I don't want to go through what I went through with Lion and will get another external hard drive and buy Carbon Copy Cloner if that's what I should. Already purchased Disc Warrior per CCC suggestion and will bite the bullett if you say to

Hey Barney

I'm at the Apple store now and they suggest i NOT upgrade to Mountain Lion. They say it will lag due to not just faster processor, but graphics card, which is a monster compared to what's on my macbook.

This is first Apple person to suggest staying with Lion. My Macbook had 8 Gig Ram and the 2.4 GHz processor is just a little slower (2.50 I think in new macbook pro). The RAM in thr Pro is DDR3 like mine but its faster so i don't know if 8 gigs of 1066 is much better than 4 of 1366?

anyway, i bought a new exrenal hard drive a G Drive Slim 500GB which is plenty and probably will run it through Time Machine but thought I'd pick your brain about this

Of course since my macbook is maxed out in every way except for hard drive, when it goes I'll have to get a pro but hoping that's 2-3 years away at least

thanks for your help

keith

Hi Mike

that's what people said about carbon copy cloner and it was anything but painless

why can't I just use Time Machine

I ended up spending hours with owner of CCC. It would get halfway through and stop. seems disc utility wasn't allowing CCC to fix files for transport, or whatever CCC had to do to certain files.

owner of CCC had me buy disc warrior which I did

then my Lacie external died

last night i simply used time capsule and plugged in a 500 GB external (G/Drive) i bought at apple store. CCC had partitioned my 250 GB hard drive into 2 125 GB partitions. I backed up both partitions. this also puts all my important data on the encrypted external so i have that data at mozy, a thumb drive, drop box, and external.

I put everything on thumb drives on a new thumb drive once a year and destroy old one.

Did Time Machine make a bootable backup? if not I'll try CCC again.

if i sound confused, i am

keith

No. You were clear, I just wasn't paying attention. I got CCC to extend trial period 1 day and tried to make a bootable clone last night but can't because now my destination (the new external hard drive) "Won't create a Lion backup because the g-drive slim volume is a CoreStorage volume, space cannot be borrowed from this volume for the purpose of creating a Recovery HD volume".

So, if I understand this tidbit correctly, I have to wipe the external HD and start over if I want to make a bootable clone. Is that correct? This is going to sound amazingly ignorant, but how do I do this? I just plugged it in and everything's there going through Finder but no toolbar.

I want to make a bootable clone. then if i want to buy mountain lion would it be possible to partition the clone and install there? Should I do this?

Thanks in advance for your help

Thanks for reply. I did plug it in and use Time Machine, which was probably not a good idea. So, I've tried to do what you have suggested.

Opened Disc Utility. Went to Erase tab and chose the external hard drive on the left hand side. Chose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the Format. But when I went to the partition tab Options is greyed out. The Map Scheme IS GUID but the message beside the Partition Layout reads: "Disc Utility cannot modify this disc because it contains CoreStorage physical volumes. Use command line diskutil instead." Not only do I not understand what that means, below this is says: "This partition can't be modified because it contains encrypted partitions."

So, do I need to go to Erase and simply erase the entire drive? If so, will I then be able to proceed as I planned?

The fact that I put everything on this external HD eventually leads to a CoreStorage problem so far no matter which route I take. I also have Disc Warrior if that is useful information for you.

Thank you again for your help. It is very much appreciated.

keith