Comments on: How-To: Upgrade to Leopard

By: Maddio

Maddio — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:18:40 +0000

I’m about to upgrade to Tiger and then to Leopard from my G5 machine with Panther, wish me good luck!!!

The good thing is that I don’t need anything from what I have now, so I’ll try “Erase & Install”

Any advise?

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:51:16 +0000

I have a similar problem. When you read and follow the installation guide it takes you the simple route, BUT, with a difference on my computer it wont allow me to install. I need to go click options and when I do that it tells me that I have to erase all data.
I just want to UPGRADE NOT ERASE from 10.3.9 to Leopard.

What do I do about this? Any suggestions?

By: vlad

vlad — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:33:49 +0000

i have the macbookg4 running , panther 10.3.9i bought the discs leoprard 10.5.2but when i try to install leopard i get the error:Mac OSX cannot be installed on this computer?can anyone help me ?im newbie to mac

By: Barbara

Barbara — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:46:44 +0000

I downgraded my Macbook from Leopard to Tiger so that I could run Pro Tools. Now I’ve upgraded back to Leopard, with a full back up – I thought – to an external hard drive. But now I can’t open Mail – not on the Mac and not from the external hard drive. Where has it gone? Have I lost all my folders? I’m without email, and without very precious emails and documents saved to the email Folders. Completely panicked.

By: vanni

vanni — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:13:25 +0000

see this thread: http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-51904.html

By: Pinx

Pinx — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:50:52 +0000

I just upgraded to Leopard 10.5.4 from OS X 10.3.9. I love Leopard and most things appear fine after the installation, except Safari and Software Update, both say they cannot connect to the server. My internet appears fine, works for email and Firefox works just fine. What can I do?

By: jo

jo — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:34:56 +0000

Hi Jenelle,
Given my experience I’d say – Don’t do it! It lets you upgrade but things don’t run properly afterwards and the response from the apple store is you shouldn’t really do it. Either upgrade to Tiger and then to Leopard. If you still have 10k plus of free space you might be able to do an archive and install.

I ended up going into the store and my 40 minute (double length session) with a genius extended to kicking out time (4 hours) and I carried on working to 2am at home…

On an already upgradeed machine I did (with the good support of the genius) an archive and install. It’s effectively a clean install which backs up your old system to a directory.
In theory it restores your account basics afterwarsd and you can put the rest back. In my case however it failed to restore things, and just did a clean install and I had to create a new account adn manually pull thingns back (which has been tricky but is working.) In the end the system is at least running in a usable manner.

So basically do what you can to get a backup device. If you can borrow one off a friend, if you find the money to buy one, being able to save all your files somewhere safe and install from scratch will give you a far better system all round. Yes you’ll have to restore things but better to do that in a controlled way when you expect to have to (most of your settings are in ~username/Library/Applications and are plist files, or you can reconfigure setups from scratch adn just use the backup for all your piccies.

Oh and don’t expect iCal to be the same if you use it much.

It’s had a rewrite which has stripped out 80% of it’s functionality and usability as a time management tool and left it as a weak and incapable calendar. I expect we’re going to be sold a useful time management tool separately any day now.

Best of luck with your ibook, and do find a way around upgrade (and make sure you have the memory too..

jo
(still fixing her system from the double upgrade and I used to work in unix tech support at top level some years ago)

By: Jenelle Ferreira

Jenelle Ferreira — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:04:24 +0000

I have an ibook G4 and I’m looking to upgrade my OSX 10.3 to Leopard. Is this possible? Also I don’t have any way of backing up all my files. I have over a thousand wedding photos that I won’t to keep. I am not very mac savy. Do you know if the people at the apple store would be able to do the upgrade? Thank you

By: jo

jo — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:08:10 +0000

well, I so wish I’d found this first.
i just upgraded my ibook g4 from 10.3.9 to 10.5
I think it was a bit much for it.
thankfully i got backsups (with backup) and just transfered a whole bunch of stuff to a firelite disk i have first (partly to create enough space). 9g it said it needed, I cleared 10 and it filled it.
It looked like it was going okay until I opened iCal (which my life is basically run around – with a whole load of different calendars. I was really looking forward to being able to put them in groups and make life simpler.

It’s certainly simpler… I’ve only got about a third of my calendars left.
Before I manually create a new calendar in the shiny new ical from the backup which i have restored to a spare folder – is this a known problem with a known get around?

also where do you change the colour of a calendar in the new ical – I may just be over stressed and overlooking it, but the fact it’s rearranged all the calendars to various colours, none what they were before is making it even harder to identify which ones are missing (all of the work ones with my bookings for the next few months are definitely missing of course. …

with gratitude to anyone who can help…

By: Pablodius

Pablodius — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:34:15 +0000

to will, #32, You will have to buy another copy of leopard to get a new Key. However, if you feel like being sneaky you might want to try and call apple and tell them that you lost your key but you have a disk. They may charge you 15 bucks, but that is cheap for a legitimate CD Key. I havent tried this myself, but I have known it to work.

By: will

will — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:55:23 +0000

How many copies of an operating system can be installed? We’ve got an Imac at home, which has Leopard, and I’m running a Tiger MacBook. Can I use the same disc, or will I have to buy it all?

By: Oscar

Oscar — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:26:46 +0000

Great post!

I’ve got only one question and i don’t find any solution. May be you can solve it.

My mac is a Mac Intel iMac and i’ve made a full HD copy bootable with superduper in my external HD USB2.0, not firewire.

Then i’ve started from this copy and all works fine.

Is it possible to migrate all my data from this USB device if i choose the migration assitant?
I’ve read that must be a firewire disk but is it possible to do it with a usb disk bootable?

In case this fails, is any solution to restore the old system?

Thanks!! ;)

By: peter

peter — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:01:12 +0000

we fixed it. yay command line! thanks for your help andrew.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:36:46 +0000

peter, you shouldn’t have any issues. If you have APE running or think you have it running (through LogiTech mouse drivers, for example) Google around for ways to get rid of it.

If you can, make a backup. In fact, you may as well consider an external drive for Time Machine anyway, and the larger the drive, the more space you can partition off for storage. This will also help alleviate your current storage issues. Leopard itself takes around 7GB, and you’ll need more space if you choose to Archive and Install.

By: peter

peter — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:23:08 +0000

I currently am running 10.3.9 on a non-intel iMac g5. Are there going to be major issues when i do the upgrade install? Also, i don’t have that much space left on the hard drive, will that be an issue as well?

Thanks

By: Haha

Haha — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:33:05 +0000

I did an Upgrade already. The only problem i have is with “Software Update”. It says that there are new items available, but these items do not show up in the list. But, i can live with it coz i can manually download it from apple.com/download. THe upgrade took me like a little over 35 minutes.

By: David

David — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:22:55 +0000

In regards to tech tip #1, you state Apple have typically done a good job ensuring the upgrade method works well. But with Leopard, you no longer recommend this method because there have been too many significant changes. Have there not been significant changes with prior OS releases? What evidence do you have that Apple hasn’t ensured a reliable and robust upgrade method this time around? Pardon my skepticism of your recommendation, but it seems most problems with the upgrade method thus far have been related to dodgy third-party products. Assuming a system is problem-free and doesn’t have a bunch of hacks installed, the upgrade method is often the most straightforward and simplest way to upgrade the OS.

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:59:45 +0000

I downloaded superduper…which is now creating a file called backup.sparseimage on one of my external drives. I have never ‘restored a backup’ in the past, I have always just erased, and reinstalled all my software. However, it’s mid-semester and there’s no way I have the time to reinstall all the software I use daily, CS3, FCP, Word, etc… When i restore this backup upon installation of Leopard will I be able to retain usage of my applications?

By: Michael DiStefano

Michael DiStefano — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:22:58 +0000

Kevin,

If the drive doesn’t already have data on it you can use Disk Utility which can be found in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.

By: Kevin L

Kevin L — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:54:02 +0000

Where is the best place to read up on how to partition an external hard drive?

Thanks