Leopard Spotlight: the upgrade disc gripe

I know we all have higher standards. But have you all tried upgrading windows before?

ummmm dude what the heck are you talking about... The night Lep was released I was at the apple store i have 5 macs in my house and i wanted a new MacBook pro (exchanged for the new updated version yesterday) I bought the MBP and the Family pack of Lep. first thing i did was took the drop in lep disk and held down the c key went to my disk utility and erased my disk and did a clean install of lep. My reason it used less hard drive space rather then upgrading ( no pre-installed i life)

Check again, maybe you jumped the gun again or maybe they changed the type of drop in.

i had to restart the install three times before i saw the little options button to find the three options. and that is on the boxed copy! i feel your pain!

So basically, I'm very glad I just spent the $109 at Amazon.com instead of waiting to get the up-to-date version and having to install over 10.4

Got a Mac mini over the weekend same drop-in upgrade disc. The setup up won't let you do anything unless you have 10.4 previously installed. Only if it detects 10.4 will it proceed with setup. Once it detects 10.4 and setup beings you can select a clean/erase install. But if 10.4 is not detected it won't let you even start the setup procedure.

I have the same concern as Mat, if I want to do a clean install in future I will have to first install 10.4, and then upgrade to 10.5. This is just lame on Apple's part.

When I was upgrading to Leopard from factory installed 10.4 we had a power cut. Booted up Mac mini and tried to continue setup of Leopard, but since the installer couldn't find 10.4 it would not let me install 10.5. So had to first go back and install 10.4, and then upgrade to Leopard.

This is a screenshot of setup check:
http://lh6.google.com/lukemcurley/Ryh28pYbYeI/AAAAAAAACoE/QqiVFGPnLUM/s400/MacOS.jpg

Odd. I've had up-to-date discs before for Jaguar and Panther. They both behaved like this - there is an extra preflight shell script that runs to make sure there is a previous OS installed. It is indeed a real pain if you need to reinstall as you have to downgrade (which must be an archive and install) and then upgrade.

The instructions for removing the shell script and creating a full install CD are out there on the internet (just remove one file and re-burn).

I have the upgrade disk too, and It is super lame that you can't install it on an already wipped drive. However, it does work to install 10.5 over 10.5, I think it just checks if your OS is >10.4. Then at that point you can choose Erase and Install.

I got an "up to date" disk after buying a mac 3 weeks ago and I can't install Leopard as it can't find the Tiger install for some reason... Very annoyed :(

Disk Utility shows some disk errors but can't fix them...

It seems the file is appropriately named "CheckForOSX".
Googling that gives you a bunch of instructions, such as http://www.applepedia.com/Converting_a_MacOS_X_upgrade_disk_to_a_full_installer

I have no idea if it still works in Leopard though.

darcagn: That is not the case with Windows Vista. Windows Vista (Upgrade Edition) requires that you have a functional and activated copy of Windows on your computer before allowing you to upgrade.