ok so i have a late 2008 macbook and my HD is starting to fail… I’m looking to replace it with a 128gb SSD but I’m not sure how i will get lion back onto the machine. also i have no disks anymore for the macbook. i don’t plan on mirroring this hd so just a fresh install will be fine. do i need to get a snow leo disk first then upgrade again to Lion? or is there a way to put lion right on?
if you can get your hands on a copy of lion it shouldn’t be a problem. OSX doesn’t have cd keys or anything like windows.
You could take an image of the old drive and push it to the new drive. Or you could find a lion disc and do the fresh install. Pretty much your 2 options.
to find a lion disk i would need to make one correct? i didn’t think apple put out a disk for lion. I’m fine having to spend $30 again on a OsX
The easiest way out would be to use a program such as Superduper! to clone the old drive to the new one. You can do this by cloning it to a temporary external, then back to the SSD once its installed. Another option would be to get a 2.5" USB enclosure for the old drive to mirror directly if you don’t have an external already. The machine will run identically to how it did on the old drive. All programs, icons, folders, info, etc, will all be exactly where it was.
You can install Lion directly, but obviously you need it on some sort of media. You can look for guides on how to put it on a USB drive, if you have a 8GB+ one of those. Otherwise, you can install 10.6 on optical media and upgrade to 10.7 from the App store.
yea i do not want to mirror my old drive, i have nothing important on the mac to keep. so apple sells copies on lion on flash storage?
Superduper is killer.
Yeah, the only physical media edition of Lion is on a USB key, which is $69.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD256Z/A
It’s definitely neat. It’s not that hard to make one yourself, and 8GB USB drives are about $20 or less. Just depends if the $70 is a big deal to you or not.
making my own with a DvD.i figure ill torrent it since i alrdy own it and don’t feel like spending another 30/70$
ended up making a dvd copy of lion it was quite easy to do. then stole a HD from an old laptop for now till i find a decent deal on a 128 or 160gb ssd. if anyone had some input on a good brand let me know. i hear intel is good
Have you already purchased lion? If so and you still have the dmg, you can make your own bootable lion install using disc utility.
The lion USB key does NOT contain a bootable install of lion from my readying, it is just the lion upgrade dmg file.
yea the dmg deletes itself after you use it. so since i lardy have it on my mac i figured it was ok to get it through torrent. worked out good and computer loads way faster not that i have a non failing HD in it, can’t wait to see how fast it loads with a SSD
Cool I actually just discovered this for macs that don’t have Lion Recovery built in, you can use this below to recover lion and it will install from the Internet.