Install over 10.6.8 or do a fresh install and migrate data?

Barney-15E wrote:

Then Clone SL onto the External and boot from that. From there, you can erase the drive and install Mavericks. When it runs the installer, choose the internal drive as the destination for the install.

Clone is already waiting, both as a backup if this all goes wrong, and/or to use as you've just described.

So I can install Mavericks directly onto the bare HD, and it will create the two partitions it needs for the OS and Recovery?

Thanks for the three links. Going to take me a bit to digest them.

Loner T wrote:

You have no control over Recovery HD, it is roughly 650MB and independent of the OS partition size.

Thanks, that's part of what I wanted to know. Now I'm just trying to find out if I need to create any partitions besides the main one or if the installer will automatically take care of creating a second partition for Recovery.

Barney-15E wrote:

You don’t have to do anything at all.

You are choosing to erase the drive prior to installing, but no other input is necessary on your part.

Great, I'm clear on that.

Does it then have a migration assistant, or whatever it might be called these days, to get my data and apps from the external clone?

ssls6 wrote:

As long as you have good backups, I have had better success with an install over a good working volume than I have had with a migration post clean install. A true clean install doesn't use migration or setup assistant.

I don't understand how the user folder/s and apps get transferred then. Obviously it cannot be drag and drop (apps especially)? Or is this a limitation of a "fresh" install, that you have to drag and drop data over and then install apps from scratch?