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Snow Leopard : Tips, tricks and whatever else we need to know

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Okay it 's coming Friday. Save your fellow forums members from frustration, angry and no headaches. Anything you can add to help your fellow members out from tossing it out the window. :D
 

PeterA

Well-known member
What I like about this forum is the enthusiasm of its founders and many participants. Often a goldmine of information - delivered after someone who likes being bleeding edge has learned stuff the hard way. Thanks for your great work Guy and Jack et al.

Me I cant contribute to this as I will be waiting at least 6 months for all the bugs to be ironed out. To be fair all I care about is wether my Epson prionter will work - and wether my DROBO system will be ok and wether Adobe works better or not.

All the interface flim flams gadgets gimmicks and gizmos - I am too old too care about.

Pete
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
There are several applications that will not work in Snow Leopard as of their current revisions.
1Password is one that seems to fail.
There are a couple of others I might mention but can't, but my advice is to wait 2-4 weeks after the release to allow most of the other vendors out there to rev up their code.
-bob
 
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R

Ranger 9

Guest
Carbon Copy Cloner is great, but I've occasionally gotten unexpected "oops" results with it -- and that's despite 20+ years' experience as a UNIX sysadmin!

If people want an easy way to make a "snapshot" of their current hard disk to an empty external drive before installing Snow Leopard, I would suggest starting up from your system DVD and using the "Restore" tab of the Disk Utility that's on it.

Unmount the hard drive with your current system using the buttons at the top of the Disk Utility window, then drag the hard drive's icon from the left pane to the "Source:" box. Drag your external drive's icon to the "Destination:" box, then click the Restore button. (If you get a dialog saying you need to scan your source first, choose "Scan Image for Restore..." under the Image menu.)

The process takes a while, but you can just go away and leave it. Once it's done, you can proceed with your Snow Leopard install. If anything goes wrong with that, you can start up off the external disk, which now contains an exact copy of your previous hard disk. Or you can reverse the above process to put your internal disk back the way it was.
 

David K

Workshop Member
Epson printers???
Don't know but I just contacted Colorbyte to see if ImagePrint 7 will have any issues. Last time I upgraded my OS X I had to buy an upgraded version of ImagePrint which was far more expensive than the OS X upgrade. Colorbyte said they will start testing next week and to get back to them. Will update this when I know more.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
... If people want an easy way to make a "snapshot" of their current hard disk to an empty external drive before installing Snow Leopard...
I highly recommend "Super Duper!" from Shirt Pocket Software,
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/
for cloning system disks. It's very easy to use, very configurable, and has been absolutely reliable. Also great for backup, etc. And their support folks have been very helpful when needed.

I've been using SuperDuper! for at least a couple of years ... It's saved many a situation that would have been a disastrous time-sink or data loss hell otherwise.
 
R

Ranger 9

Guest
One problem right out of the box

I just received my Snow Leopard disc and, since it's a slow day at work, thought I'd install it on my Intel Macbook here and now.

Oops, hit one problem right away:

The Snow Leopard installer wants your intended startup disk to be partitioned in GUID format rather than the older APM (Apple Partition Map) format. I hadn't realized that when I had installed my hard drive, I had partitioned it in APM, since back then it didn't really make any difference.

To change the format to GUID, you have to re-partition the disk, which erases all the data!

That in itself wasn't a deal-killer for me; I planned to image my current startup disk anyway so I'd have a safety copy in case something went wrong during the Snow Leopard installation. (I already have a Time Machine backup of the disk, but hey, I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy when it comes to disks.)

As I posted above, my preferred way to image a disk is by using the Restore tab in Apple's Disk Utility. A copy of Disk Utility is on the Snow Leopard startup disc, so it's already handy.

The only problem I hit was that Restore makes a "block copy" of the disk -- which is fast and reliable, but requires that your target disk have the same amount of space as the source disk you're imaging. That meant that even though I only have about 45gb of stuff on my laptop's 320gb startup disk, I need an empty 320gb external disk to hold my block-copied image.

I've got one of those at home, but not at the office, so my Snow Leopard install plans are stymied for now.

Moral for others: If you're getting ready to install Snow Leopard and you can't remember how your startup disk is partitioned, be prepared for the possibility that you may have to image it and then reformat it before you can proceed with your installation -- so make sure you have a big enough external disk handy to store your backup image.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Yes the new machines coming from Apple are GUID already. Mine came in that way but make sure if reformatted at one time you are in GUID
 
R

Ranger 9

Guest
Re: Snow Leopard Finder uses Base 10 instead of Base 2

so you see a space gain with is due to the conversion -
see http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=774206

I've first read this on Dpreview from JonathanUK http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1017&message=32825930

Regards
Johannes
Yes, I saw a space gain. As noted in the thread you quote, some of this is just because they have changed the usage of "mega" and "giga" from base-2 (old computer-industry convention) to base-10 (normal convention.) But even allowing for that, there's still a space gain, mostly (I think) from getting rid of old pieces of PowerPC code, and from the fact that by default it no longer installs support for hundreds of printers -- only for ones you have connected or have used recently.

Another example of this "as-needed" type of installation is Rosetta, the compatibility package that allows an Intel Mac to run older applications written for PowerPC Macs. Snow Leopard has Rosetta included on the disc, but it is not installed by default. (You have to choose a custom install to get it.)

However, if you skip installing Rosetta and then later try to launch an application that requires it, Snow Leopard will throw a dialog that -- assuming you have an active Internet connection -- offers to download Rosetta and install it. My old copy of Photoshop CS2 triggered this when I tried to launch it, and once Snow Leopard had done its thing, CS2 ran fine.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
I like that idea about not installing Rosetta at the install level and if you need it than it can be downloaded. Great idea from Apple
 
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