Snow Leopard clean install on partition and resize later

Question

I am planning to do an installation of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

This is the approach I have thought of.

1. Currently the MacBook has Leopard (10.5) on it.

2. Partition the single HDD of 150GB (75 GB already used) into two partitions, 75 each.

   a.) Should I use Disk Utility on the Leopard install disc or the Snow Leopard install disc? Would that make a difference? As I read somewhere that how the partition is stored is different in Leopard vs Snow Leopard.

3. Pop Snow Leopard disc reboot and pick the new partition and install SL on it.

4. Reboot and copy over stuff(docs, pics) from old Leopard's home folder into new one. (Don't care much about applications. very few and they can be easily reinstalled)

5. Once the stuff(4) gets copied, I want to reclaim the space used by the Leopard partition and give it all to the new Snow leopard. Should I use Disk Utility again? It wouldn't destroy my data in SL when resizing?

At the end of the above I wish to achieve the following.

1. Get a fresh shiny install of SL.
2. Preserve all old Leopard home folder stuff till I complete the SL install and can boot into Leopard if SL install went wrong in the intermediate.
3. Once migrated SL will remains as the single OS managing everything.
4. There should be only one partition with all stuff on it.

Is there anything missing or would go wrong with this approach? Will there be some extra work/steps involved somewhere which would be troublesome?

Thanks

Solution 1

Ok I started doing this as I dint get any responses for sometime.

1. Rebooted and booted from the Snow leopard install disc. To answer my own question, there is no problem in using disk utility with GUID partition map which is what you have if you started out with leopard. You can see that information at the bottom of DU before doing anything.

2. Opened Disk utility. Split into two partitions. [A] and [B]. [A] holding existing partition and [B] a fresh partition naming it as SL HD for identification. [A] appears on top of [B].

3. Went back to install screen and proceeded install Snow Leopard(SL) into [B]. After install [B] is set as the active partition (a.k.a Startup Disk in Mac parlance), rebooted and got into migration assistant.
4. Selected [A] as migration source and selected few folders(docs, pics) and network settings. Dint move Apps etc.
5. After moving rebooted into SL and everything looked fine. Noticed that some apps that I dint choose to move were still running in SL (mmm). Since I dint want them, went into the [A] part from finder and trashed applications folder, system and library.
6. Now since SL was working fine wanted to reclaim the space occupied by [A] and give it to [B].
7. Rebooted into install DVD. Opened disk utility. Found that partition wouldn't allow to resize [B] upwards. :(. Seems you cannot resize partitions with OS installed upwards(probably because it has the bootloader portion for that partition).
8. So after investigating some commercial partioners like iPartition, decided to investigate inexpensive approaches.
9. Found Restore option in DL which allows you to pick a source partition and let it be cloned over to a another partition.
10. Search for "Restore in disk utility" in google before doing it as you need to verify and repair disk permissions.
11. After that select Restore, select [B] as source and [A] as destination. Hit restore.
12. Now [A] has a cloned copy of SL. In utilities select startup disk and select [A].
13. Reboot and check if SL is working from [A].
14. Reboot back into install DVD. delete [B] and resize [A] to fill the full size. This will work as your resizing downwards and there is empty space left by [B]. Apply and your done.

Solution 2

a.) Should I use disk utility of the leopard install disk or the snow leopard install disk? would that make a difference? As I read somewhere that how the partition is stored is different in leopard vs snow leopard.

You would probably need to use the Snow Leopard disc, because I don't think the Disk Utility can resize the partition that you've booted from.

Should I use disk utility again? it wouldn't destroy my data in SL when resizing?

Yes. In theory this would work.

Is there anything missing or would go wrong with this approach? Will there be some extra work/steps involved somewhere which would be troublesome?

Looks good to me... but, I wouldn't recommend doing this. See, any time you do something potentially destructive, you want to do a full backup first. Preferably, use Carbon Copy Cloner or similar tool so if something does go wrong, you can quickly get back running.

What I would recommend is:

1. Get an external hard drive
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal hard drive onto the external drive.
3. Do an Archive and Install Install.
4. Copy the files you want to keep over.

Comments

[Josh Hunt]

BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

[Pradeep]

Agree on the backup part. but note that the approach I did was non-destructive. Not that you shouldnt take a backup but just a observation that it is possible to do such stuff(non-destructive) with DL. It seems to have only a few limitations.

[emgee]

Braver man than myself :)

[Arjan]

Maybe a link to this answer is usable at superuser.com/questions/63887/… as well?

[Badu]

Agreed - this seems like a ling run for a short slide - Snow Leopard Install is fairly safe. I assume that cash is too tight for an external drive and I bought ipartition - approx $50.

[cregox]

Yeah, but I'm actually asking Sizzler and I kinda wanted to hear his answer. Should I just have added this as a comment on the question? I didn't want to bloat it up too much. If so, I'll just delete this "answer".

[cregox]

@Sizzler, choose where you like better to answer this question, if you will. I'll repost it here, following...

[cregox]

I understand you wanted a fresh install, but is there any reason why you couldn't just install SL on top of Leopard? Wouldn't be better to just do it and clean up afterwards? Very nice self-answer, by the way. ;)