Upgrade to Yosemite on external hard drive

Ralph Landry1 wrote:

Your steps 1-7 will work.

Before doing the install, however, open Finder > Applications and make a copy of the file OS X Yosemite Install (it will be about 5.18 GB) in a safe place such as your Documents folder. That way you will not have to do another download later.

Should you want to install Yosemite on your internal drive, copy the installer from Documents to Applications and then run it.

Cool.

Does the .dmg get overwritten or deleted when you run the Installer? If so, then doing a copy makes sense. I presume you meant MOVE the installer from Documents to Applications? Wouldn't do to make yet another 5GB copy!!

Also, I see Support Downloads still has iTunes 10.7 available (my current maximum is 10.6.3) - if I installed Yosemite, then before I launched iTunes I could delete iTunes 12, download 10.7, run it, and my current library would be unaffected? (Or, could I do a Custom install that excluded iTunes?)

Ralph Landry1 wrote:

When the installer completes the install process, the final step is to erase itself. That is why it is smart to make a copy of the installer before initiating the install process. It is best to use copy rather than move as the installer normally resides in the Applications folder when it is started, leaving it there, or copying it there later for another installation, is less likely to cause confusion for the installer. It should function from anywhere, in theory, but I just don't like challenging it to make a mistake 😉

I would have to go back and check, but I think iTunes 12 is what is the version Yosemite insists on to run. iTunes 10.7 is not likely to run under Yosemite. There is no longer a custom install as in the good old days...only install.

Of course you can play around and see if you can get iTunes 10.7 to run under your external drive installation of Yosemite, since a part of your purpose is to experiment with it.

Be sure to partition your external hard drive before installing and make a clone backup of your internal drive so you have that to fall back on should anything go wrong with the internal installation when you get to that point.

I would be VERY surprised if Yosemite can only run iTunes 12? iTunes is an Apple product that is supported all the way back to Tiger, maybe even further. I've never found an older version of iTunes (that is still available from Apple) that won't run on the latest OS. I will not touch iTunes 11 or later with a bargepole, and it would stop me upgrading to Yosemite as I have several large projects on iTunes going back years, all of which require Cover Flow and List View and all sorts of other things no longer part of iTunes. I'm no fan of Album View, I don't know why Apple thinks everyone uses that or even wants it. I've used iTunes going back to iTunes 2, and I'm not going to lose my projects or start finding them awkward to deal with, or lose the Doug scripts which I depend on. However I can always try out 10.7 in Yosemite, as you suggest... [/rant]

I currently back up via Time Machine - presumably that's all I need rather than a clone backup? I still have my Snow Leopard install disks, and anyway I'll know soon enough whether I want to upgrade, from running Yosemite on the eHD.

Lanny wrote:

I would change your step #3.

Use Setup Assistant when prompted to migrate your current User settings and applications to the Yosemite partition. Otherwise you won't be able to see how everything would work in Yosemite.

Ah, but if all I want to do is to make sure the Apps actually run, I wouldn't need to do that? That's my main objective, so I can worry about Preferences and such-like when or if I upgrade?

kahjot wrote:

You may be able to get iTunes 10.7 working in Yosemite, but possibly with a hiccup or two. Here's a link to an explanation of how to get iTunes 10.7 working in Mavericks: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1667115

You can make a bootable Yosemite installer on a flash drive:

http://osxdaily.com/2014/10/16/make-os-x-yosemite-boot-install-drive/

Something else to consider:

http://awesometoast.com/yosemite-core-storage-and-partition-woes/

Your iMac's Snow Leopard internal drive should be OK, since you are installing Yosemite on an external drive and using Snow Leopard's Disk Utility to format it. However, the Yosemite drive will NOT be visible as a bootable option in Snow Leopard's Startup Disk pref once you have installed Yosemite on that drive. To boot into Yosemite from Snow Leopard, you will have to do so by restarting and holding the option key down until the bootable volumes appear.

Thanks for the links - I'll have a look at those before proceeding. Boot+Option was how I assumed I was going to have to get into Yosemite anyway.

Yes, you can install straight to an empty partition on an external HD. You have to download the installer to your 10.6.8 Mac first (5GB! It will take a while..) but when you click the Installer you can choose which drive to install it to. My external HD is also USB2 so Yosemite is slow, but not unbearably. Once in, the main drags are not in running Apps themselves but in things like System Prefs, system commands, things like that.

If you need Yosemite for a single app then I wouldn't waste time and space by migrating your user data over to Yosemite. Set up a new user for that one app and when you've finished work, just save your documents from it to a memory stick, or drag to the Shared folder of your Mac.

I don't know how fast your 2009 MacBook is, but I'm using a 2011 iMac with 12GB RAM and it works ... ok. A Thunderbolt-to-USB3 adaptor (if only there was a cheap one 😟 ) would speed things up a treat, but for a single item use you should find it acceptable.

The installation took a few hours on my machine, but that was mainly because I also migrated users and applications across.

I've started a new topic here giving my thoughts on Yosemite, after Snow Leopard, and I didn't find much to get excited about tbh. But then, I didn't delve into Versions (would probably never use it; Time Machine - which I rarely need except for migration - is enough for me), Autosave (I already have all the autosave I need in SL), the new Spotlight (but then, Alfred already does what it delivers), Mission Control (does it beat Exposé? no), Notifications (yes, they're cool), Message Center (aaargh, no thank you), Resume (didn't get around to exploring that, but I would think that's a really useful thing), Dictation (I already use Dragon Dictate, whose documentation is quite good, unlike Apple's, which is non-existent).