![]() If you’ve got one of these Macs, still running Tiger, and you’re determined to upgrade it to Mountain Lion, the first two methods below (“The official way” and “The brute-force method”) will work the third method (“The quick-but-techie way”) will not. Note that there are actually two Mountain Lion-compatible Macs-the Mid 2007 iMac and the Mid/Late 2007 MacBook Pro-that shipped with Tiger. Whichever method you choose, you should-as with any OS installation-be sure to have an up-to-date, tested backup of your drive before you begin. So how can you install Mountain Lion over Leopard? There are three ways: the official way, the brute-force method, and the quick-but-techie way. You may be thinking, “If it will install onto a blank drive, I’ll just copy the installer to my Leopard-equipped Mac, connect an empty drive, install the new OS there, and then use Setup/Migration Assistant to move my files over.” Alas, while the Mountain Lion installer will freely install onto a blank drive, the Mountain Lion installer itself must be run from within Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion. The Mountain Lion installer will, however, install onto a blank drive, so Mountain Lion clearly doesn’t need any of Snow Leopard’s files or settings. In my testing with many Macs, the Mountain Lion installer, like the Lion installer before it, refuses to install onto a drive containing Leopard in fact, it refuses to install on any drive running a version of Mac OS X below 10.6.8, just as its official system requirements claim. The Mountain Lion installer refuses to install onto a drive running Leopard (OS X 10.5). ![]() So then the question becomes whether there are any technical reasons you can’t install Mountain Lion over Leopard. ![]() In other words, in our view, you should be well within your rights to install Mountain Lion on any of your computers for which you have a valid, current Snow Leopard or Lion license-even if you don’t actually install Snow Leopard first. While the letter of the law says you need to install at least Snow Leopard before installing Mountain Lion, the spirit of the law seems to be that a particular Leopard-equipped Mac just needs a license for Snow Leopard or Lion before you can upgrade it. The practical questionīut lets take a step back. Lion-installation articles), I can tell you that it’s a real hassle. Having performed this two-step upgrade many times while researching our various Mountain Lion-installation articles (and last year while writing our This is just one scenario-I can think of a number of situations in which you might have Leopard on a Mac or an external drive, along with a valid license for Snow Leopard, and you’d rather not take the interim step of installing Snow Leopard just to upgrade to Mountain Lion.
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