(Revised May 2008)
I recently upgraded to Leopard successfully
and I thought I would share my experience and
include some guidelines and some troubleshooting tips.
Before I updated my internal drive, I made certain I had two
separate clones of my Tiger drive just in case Leopard
didn't work well. I have two external
drives and I partitioned each drive with three volumes: one
for Tiger (80 GB), one for Leopard (80 GB) and the third one
for data, including my iTunes music. I cloned my main Tiger
drive to both extra drives. I also copied all of my data files
from my main drive to one of my external drives.
After I tested the cloned drives to make sure they were
working correctly, I set my internal drive as my startup
drive in System Preferences and then I shut down my computer.
I disconnected all of my peripheral devices except for my
display, my ADSL modem, an Apple mouse, and an Apple
keyboard. I restarted the computer and inserted the Leopard
Install disk.
The Leopard Install disk walks you through the upgrade
process but here are some tips that might help you:
1. After you select the installation type (Upgrade,
Archive & Install, Clean Install), click the Customize
button on the pane. Click the arrow next to Printers and
deselect any printer drivers that you are certain you
won't need. This will save you some disk
space, especially if you don't need the
larger files for Epson, HP, Canon, or Lexmark.
2. Follow the instructions on the screen to continue with the installation.
3. After the installation is completed, your Mac will
be restarted from the hard drive. Be patient while your
computer restarts - it will take longer than a normal restart
and it might stay on the solid blue screen for a few
minutes.
4. The Leopard Setup Assistant will open
automatically after booting and you can use it to set up your
Apple ID and send your registration information to
Apple.
5. After the Setup Assistant finishes, open System
Preferences and select Accounts. Click the lock in the lower
left corner of the pane and enter your password. If the
system won't accept your password,
you'll need to reboot into the Leopard
install disk. This is, apparently, a bug in
Leopard's install program that affects
some computers.
When the Leopard install screen appears, select
your language. On the next screen, select
"Change Password" from the Utilities menu and type in a password for your hard
drive (you can use the previous password you had). Next,
restart your computer by selecting your hard drive from the
Startup option on the Utilities menu. The password problem
should be fixed after your computer restarts.
Before connecting to the Internet, turn on the Mac OS X
10.5 firewall. It is now located on the Security pane in
System Preferences (it was on the Sharing pane in Tiger).
If there are any new updates to Mac OS X 10.5, install them as soon as possible.
Learn more about installing Leopard with our Introduction to Leopard - Book 1.
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