Updating os x tiger

Waite Paul D. Waite 2, 12 12 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 51 51 bronze badges. Make sure you have a Mac that is actually supported by SnowLeopard. Iirc, only Intel-Macs are supported. Heiko — ah yes, good point. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. No - You need the BoxSet to upgrade from Tiger the simple upgrade is for Leopard only - the link you give to Snow Leopard says that — mmmmmm. The question doesn't specify technically or according to the licensing terms.

I'll clarify the answer. Back when this was a relevant question, I told people to just buy snow leopard. There are no serial numbers or activation or anything like that in these OSes.

The installers just work. After Snow Leopard, they made all the OSes free anyway. Harv Harv 6, 16 16 silver badges 41 41 bronze badges. Sure — I made a bootable backup before the upgrade. Just throwing it out there. That state remained for a solid three days. My PowerBook's internal SuperDrive cratered just before the install. When I attempted to boot the inch PowerBook from the LG drive, the drive spun up promisingly but the PowerBook booted rather, failed to boot from the busted hard drive image.

My first cheat was to try activating the Mac's boot media list by holding down the option key at power-up. I'm writing this on the third generation of PowerBook that's run through my lab. I ended up putting the inch PowerBook in target disk mode, which for the uniniated is a nifty, life-saving hack that turns a Mac system into an external FireWire hard drive.

I installed to the inch 1. It took a while. It's a lucky thing I had another Mac. If the inch PowerBook had been my only machine, I'd have been up the creek. Of course I had backups, but making this work in-place was a requirement of the exercise. Running the inch PowerBook in target disk mode did get OS X through the upgrade process to its be right back reboot. I felt relieved and called it a very late night.

Success required not only using target disk mode, but switching from an in-place upgrade to archive-and-install, the latter being a method that moves existing system files to a safe directory before clobbering them with the new OS. This trick is helpful for those of us who speak Unix, but who else would know what to do with those backed up files? There's no opportunity to back out the upgrade, boot from the safe copy of the system files or pull in portions of those files to fill gaps in the new installation e.

I woke the next day ready to celebrate my victory, but the inch PowerBook would not boot. The screen cleared to the GUI progress bar and sat there. Booting into verbose mode, which reveals the hidden boot-time text that might remind mere mortals that they're running Unix, showed that it was a miracle the machine got to the GUI at all. Almost nothing loaded as the OS expected it to, and that which did load didn't initialize and died at launch. I still refused to punt; I had to play like that wasn't an option.

I booted to single-user mode and dug through the logs as a programmer digs through build errors. It amounted to shutting off all OS X network services, fiddling with the config settings of each and test-launching them from the command line to see how far they'd get.

It also tells you how to work out what is the newest version of OSX that you can run on your computer. The folks over at everyMac. You can access that list here.

Within these major versions there are also smaller software updates. For example Before you do a major update to a new version of OS X it is good to make sure that your current version is up to date because some installers require you to have an updated version of your current version.

My laptop had Snow Leopard The easiest way to get a copy of the installer for OS X is to go the Apple website or the App Store and type in the version that you want.

Tf you have not downloaded it previously and you want an older version that is not the latest version, you may need to find a friend who has downloaded it previously and get it from there computer.

If you have a version of OS X that is older than You can buy If you run it from there, it will install the latest OSX but then it will delete itself. This is especially the case if you have three or four different computers. You can use the same installer file on different computers. So it is much faster and uses less of your Internet bandwidth to download the installer once and use it on your different computers via a thumb drive rather than downloading it four times.

A green plus will appear to indicate that it will make a copy of the installer. Hold down the option key while dragging installer to your desktop and a copy will be made. Now that you have made a copy of the installer, grab an 8GB thumb drive, and download this program called Disk Maker X. You can do this manually, and I have explained how here , but DiskMaker X automates the process and makes it a lot simpler. Run Disk Maker X and it will ask you for the location of the Installer file.

It will also ask you to choose your thumb drive. Show it where the installer file is, select your USB thumb drive, and it will make a bootable version of the OS X installer.