[OSX-Users] Re: Install iLife on Lion

[Philip Boulain]

On 15/03/2012 21:20, Jules Field wrote:
> I very much doubt they support 10.4's iLife release on 10.6, but it 
> may well work. Check with Google and then give it a try!

Well, a random guy in a comment thread says it works! Totally reliable 
source. :)

I suppose I could also mount the 10.4 image backup and copy the 
application bundles, since that should be closer to matching if I'd done 
an upgrade with them already present. Unless the upgrader detects such 
things and applies magic workarounds.

> Assuming you have a Time Machine backup of the system before you start 
> trying that, you can always back off to the previous state.

I take it there's no way to get Time Machine to make shadow copies to 
the host drive, a la Windows Vista/7?

>> * Full-on zeroing-the-drive-first clean reinstall. It's the only way 
>> to be sure.
> Repartitioning in Disk Utility (which you can run from the 
> installation media) is all that's required. Unlike with Windows, 
> there's no need to zero out the partition table explicitly, just 
> repartitioning the disk to a "1 Partition" layout is sufficient.

Since I no longer plan to dedicate a HFS+ formatted drive to the Mac for 
backups (it's existing allocation is full of 10.4 image, hard drive 
prices are still peaked post-flood, and frankly having to carve out a 
HFS+ partition is just needlessly awkward in a heterogeneous world), 
zeroing the drive has the huge advantage of being able to take sparse 
images with arbitrary cross-platform tools (e.g. GNU ddrescue) to 
arbitrary filesystems (except HFS+, since it doesn't support sparse 
files), since all the unused space is nice and clean.

Also after the absolute mess 10.4 made of that drive when it got nearly 
full, I really, really, didn't want to give it any excuse to create 
anything less than a pristine new filesystem. 10.6 gets a fair shot at a 
clean slate.

-- 
Phil
(You don't have to zero the partition table on Windows any more, either. 
There's finally a noddy graphical partitioner in the installer since 7! 
Gone are the days of scrummaging around in the dark depths of text 
consoles trying to make fdisk do something useful, across the board.)