OT - Upgrading from Apple's Tiger to the Leopard operating sytem

[efiebke]

Hello -

I am getting ready to make the move from the Tiger operating system to Leopard. The upgrade will be on my 2 year old MacPro computer (2 X's 2.66 Duo-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB's RAM, 4 HDD's, Motu's 2408 MK3 & Motu's MTPAV). In reading the posts on this and other forums, it seems that the Logic Pro 8 program is running fairly smoothly with Leopard (especially with the later version of Leopard like 10.5.6).

I will probably do a clean install of Leopard. My concern in doing this, though, is the time, effort and possible heart-ache of re-activating all of the plug-ins that I've purchased throughout these past couple of years. I use most of them quite often.

Here is a list of most of my plug-ins:

Native-Instrument's Kontakt 2
Native-Instrument's Kontakt 2 Player (GPO, JABB, Chris Hein Guitars, Elite Orchestral Percussion, Garritan Stradivari, Garritan Gofriller)
Music Lab's RealGuitar
Music Lab's RealStrat
Music Lab's MolCP3
Universal Audio's UAD-1 (with various activated plug-ins)
IK Multimedia's Amplitube 2
And. . . various plug-ins that run on the full version of Kontakt 2 (so, the Kontakt 2 plug-in is quite important to me.)

I also own Apple's Final Cut Pro Studio 2 and a few of Adobe's software programs.

Of course the other option to upgrading to Leopard is just upgrade on top of the existing operating system (verses a clean install of Leopard). However, I've read that this path to upgrading to Leopard can be problematic.

My questions are:

1) Has anyone NOT experience problems by upgrading Leopard on top of Tiger?? (Not a clean install).

2) If I do a clean install (and I probably will do the upgrade by this method), has anyone experienced problems/issue re-activating the programs and plug-ins noted above? This includes the Apple programs including Logic Pro 8 and Final Cut Pro.

3) Finally, what would be the best procedure to use during the upgrade process (no matter which upgrade process I use)?

I thank you in advance for your time and effort in reading and answering these questions.

Regards,

Ted

[LFO]

Hey Ted,
I've only been a Leopard user, but I have several friends who went from Tiger to Leopard. It is widely accepted that a clean install is the way to go, so you should be safe with that. When I moved from my Windows box to my iMac I had to reinstall / reauthorize about 30 or so plug-ins. Ugh. I had zero problems. That being said, you probably will. ~|

The only advice I can give you is to be sure you have a backup (Time Machine is my software of choice) and a backup of your backup on a separate drive. If you do you will have a sure fall-back in the case that anything goes wrong.

Oh - don't forget to deauthorize any software that requires it.

I purchased Bento and I use it to keep all of my registration information. Every program, web site, etc. that I own is in the database I created so I never have to guess about serial numbers, user ids and passwords. (Yes, if you got hold of this database you would have control of my life! Fortunately I keep it safe. ;) )

Bento is also good for taking a picture of equipment and recording the serial number of equipment.

Bento is also a great way to keep a list of everything installed on your drive. Until I started using it I would always `lose' a program or two, especially if they were downloadable programs. That problem is officially fixed.

One more thought that I don't have the answer to. Snow Leopard should be out soon. Maybe you should wait to upgrade after it comes out and you have confidence in it. This might save you an extra OS build and applications installation.

Good luck!

-Kevin

[efiebke]

Kevin -

First, thank you for the thoughtful reply. I think I will go the "Clean Install" route. Now I just have to figure out which plug-ins and software programs need to be de-activated then re-activated for this process.

Do Native-Instruments plug-ins (Kontakt 2, GPO, JABB, etc., etc) need to be de-activated??

Ted

[LFO]

Hey Ted,
The programs that have limited authorizations will state so clearly in the installation documentation. For instance, Finale has a limit of around 3 installations, so I have to make sure to de-authorize before re-installing. I don't think any of the Native Instrument products require de-authorization.

Glad to hear the clean install went well!

-Kevin

[efiebke]

Kevin -

Thank you, again, for your insight and support. I must say that the entire task is a bit frightening to me. By the way, I haven't done the upgrade yet. I figure that it will take me days to re-install and re-activate all of the programs and plug-ins that I own. I have a small stretch of days off from work when I will be able to focus solely on the upgrade process. In the meanwhile, I'm gathering in as much information as possible. You have been very helpful with this. :)

Kind regards,

Ted

[indianamusic]

I would suggest running Disk Utility after installing each program and do a repair permissions - every time.