Upgrading to Snow Leopard

I pur­chased Snow Leop­ard, oth­er­wise known as Mac OS X 10.6, a week ago. I’ve upgraded all 3 of my Macs in the last few days. I reclaimed at least 7 GB of hard drive space on one Mac, and got 18 GB back on my Mac Mini.

I reviewed an unof­fi­cial wiki called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leop­ard com­pat­i­bil­ity list a few days before I started, and updated a cou­ple of appli­ca­tions before I ran each upgrade.

The Mac Mini and Mac­Book upgrades were easy enough — just a cou­ple of hours to com­plete the upgrade process. No drama, no fail.

My Mac­Book Pro, which dates back to 2006, was the last of three to get upgraded. It deliv­ered one sur­prise. The screen’s back­light wouldn’t work dur­ing the upgrade process.

For­tu­nately, a quick Google search revealed a thread that dis­cussed this very prob­lem: see OS 10.6 — Snow Leop­ard Install Failed on my Mac­Book Pro — How I fixed it!

There are more ele­gant approaches, but I used a very bright flash­light to help me read the screen and fin­ish the upgrade. Crude, but effec­tive. After the upgrade, the bright­ness keys started work­ing again and I could see the screen.

I haven’t had a prob­lem since then. Other users have tried dif­fer­ent approaches, as described in this Red­dit page called Black screen while installing Snow Leop­ard on a Mac­book Pro? It’s not frozen, the back­light is sim­ply switched off.

At some point, HPU’s IT depart­ment will say it’s OK for me to upgrade the iMac in my office to Snow Leop­ard. When that hap­pens, I’ll have a chance to see the 64-bit ker­nel in action. I’ve tried this free Startup Mode Selec­tor on a cou­ple of my Macs, just to see what hard­ware I have.

Image by rofana­tor on flickr via a Cre­ative Com­mons license

Tagged as: Apple, mac, macbook, macbookpro, macmini, software, upgrade