I had a horrible experience when I first installed “Lion” (10.7.0). It crashed or hung constantly and was as slow as molasses in January.

I could handle the general slowness, but not the incredible length of time it took to reboot after a crash and not the crashes which meant lost work. There were other issues, but those I could live with. Things got so bad that I reverted to OS X "Snow Leopard" and went through hell to get there. An interesting Twitter comment by Corey Tamas I came across (no, I don’t subscribe to Twitter, but just followed a link):

Oh, one measure of the adoption of Lion has Snow Leopard use being almost 4 times that of Lion and even Leopard having more users (Snow Leopard 56%; Leopard 22%; Lion 16%). That was reported in mid-November 2011.

OS X Lion sees slow adoption...

Leaving aside all those issues, I discovered yesterday that Lion was now up to 10.7.2, which is about where I had decided it had to get before I dare try it again. So I bit the bullet...

Having been bitten by Apple’s Time Machine backup system last time, this time I used a separate external hard drive to make a bootable image copy of my computer’s hard drive. That turned out to be a good move because...

I had my Mac set up to do true multi-boot. This is different than on most “PC”s as Apple uses EFI on their Intel Macs. Before I reverted to Snow Leopard, I had created a bootable USB-stick with the OS X Lion installation on it (one can discover how to do this on the Internet). I booted from that, thinking the upgrade would be nice and straightforward. Yeah, right! The Lion installer would not let me choose my internal drive — it simply couldn't handle the multi-boot setup. Well, I only had that set up so I could boot my Mac into Ubuntu Linux (it worked quite well) and didn't have any real data stored on it.

So, what the hell, I brought up Disk Utility and reformatted the drive as a single partition and went ahead with the install.

That's when it got interesting, because Apple have provided functionality that allows one to grab existing data and settings, included “Users” off another Mac OR off a backup disk. I re-hooked up the external drive which I'd carefully unmounted and unplugged (do you get the idea I don't trust software?) and was able to select the external drive. I have to admit, the installation process then copied all the data and settings almost flawlessly into the new installation.

If I had a normal setup, I would have been finished at that point, but I'm a computer prodder-and-poker. I do a bit of web site development, including server-side stuff... and I like to do my development on my Mac and then upload to the servers (it’s generally faster than working directly on the server and definitely faster when taking sites live or upgrading them). So my Mac set up is probably not “normal” but more akin to a computer used for software development.

The next post will discuss this.