Although I’ve had few problems with the Tiger OS X operating system for my Apple Mac, there’ve been a few occasions recently where applications have not supported Tiger (e.g. Google Chrome, Evernote etc) – this is only going to get worse.
So I thought I’d better make the move from Tiger to the latest Mac OS Snow Leopard. Easier said than done.
Here’s how I managed to upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard.
First, let’s address my two initial points of confusion:
- Can you move straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard? There is little guidance on this but the answer is YES (provided you’ve got the right hardware i.e. Mac with an Intel Processor . 1 GB of RAM. DVD drive for installation and 5GB of spare hard drive disk space).
- Is it a case of just sticking the Snow Leopard CD ROM in to update and sitting back – NO!
(I wonder whether point 1 is not widely publicised because plenty of folk will have paid £100+ to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard OS when it was launched a couple of years ago (before the launch of Snow Leopard) however, now you can jump directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard for just £25!)
As you have gathered from point 2 above, I did initially just shove the Snow Leopard disk, rebooted my Macbook (holding down the C key to activate the installation process) and installed it. Beforehand, I had ensured that I had cleared up my disk using the handy Disk Inventory X free tool to free up the minimum 5 GB. I had also backed up my data.
It all appeared to install fine, but when I clicked on Safari, iTunes, Finder and pretty much any other application (apart from Firefox) it failed showing an error message along the lines of “Safari quit unexpectedly”. So frustrating!
Here was my Twitter feed at the time!:
After much searching online using trusty Firefox (with Safari now defunct) for possible explanations, I found the following which came to the rescue:
This article. – although the disk permissions etc didn’t actually help, it was the reference to the “fresh installation” that opened my eyes to the fact I’d probably missed something…..
This video showed exactly what I should have done – basically, erase Tiger OS. Having followed this advice, it worked perfectly.
I hope this works for you too.