I bet those Apple users out there are craving to death on upgrading their machine box to Apple latest Mac OS X, codename Snow Leopard. You might have sneaking all over the web, reading about Snow Leopard and its reviews. Now, you decided that you want to continue upgrading you current Mac OS X version with Snow Leopard. Here, I’ll try my best to guide you upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard using External Storage, instead of the DVD itself.

The reason why I’m using an external drive and not the DVD is because the reading speed of these two medium. A DVD can be read up around 10 Mbps (8x speed) while s0me usb drive can go up to 30 Mbps and an external hard drive has a speed up to 480 Mbps with USB 2.0. However, this is just an another installation technique and not compulsory.

Before Installation

My Mac OS X version, Leopard 10.5.8 before the installation.

Before we continue with the upgrading process, I advise you to do some house cleaning, back up your data, incase something unpredicted might occur. It is also advisable to clone your current Mac OS X setup incase you want to revert back to Leopard later.

FYI : Onyx is not compatible with Snow Leopard, so clean your machine while you’re still on Leopard

Next, prepare your tools:

1. Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD
2. USB drive / External Hard Disk
3. Some drinks or reading stuff.

Now, lets continue with our installation process.

Installing Snow Leopard From USB Drive

1. Load in the Snow Leopard DVD onto your Mac. You should be greeted with something like this.

Snow Leopard DVD content

2. Close the window, and run your Disk Utility which can be found under Applications > Utilities folder. Now were going to convert the external drive as our installation source, replacing the DVD.

Disk Utility

3. With the external drive mounted to the machine, create a partition of 8 GB and format as Mac OS Extended. Same goes to Pendrive, given that your minimum capacity is 8 GB but you don’t have to partition the drive. Now were are going to restore the external drive with our Snow Leopard DVD. This will prepare the drive as our installer.

Change your tab to Restore. Now, right-click on the Snow Leopard DVD. Drag the “Set as source” to the source input area.

Select Snow Leopard as the source for Restore

Then, right-click on our external drive, in this case, my 8 GB Kingston pendrive, and drag “Set as destination” to the destination input area.

Select our external drive as the destination

You should end up with something like this. Click on the Restore button to start restoring the DVD to your external drive.

Click on Restore to start the process

4. When the restoration process is done. Eject the DVD and restart your machine with the external drive connected. After you hear the start-up sound, immediately press and hold the Option key to load up the boot option page. You should be greeted with something like this. However, I’m having an extra drive for my Windows XP partition. Select the orange drive entitle “Mac OS X Install DVD”. Wait for the drive to be loaded onto the RAM.

Mac OS X boot option page

5. After the drive has been booted, you should have the language menu page on your screen. Choose your preferable language and press the arrow button.

The language option

6. Ok. Now we’re going to start the installation process. Pray that your upgrading process won’t hurt you later. Pray a lot. Huhu. Press continue.

The installation starting page

7. Next, will be the Software License Agreement. After finish reading the agreement, and you chose to agree with the term and condition applied, press Agree.

License Agreement

8. Then, you will be given the option to chose the Partition or Drive which you will install Snow Leopard. In my case, I have 2 drives, however only 1 is supported for Mac OS X and the other one is my Windows XP partition. So, I choose XUN’s as my installation path.

Installation path and drive

9. If you want to customise your installation, click on the Customize button at the bottom left. Here, I choose only 1 language and deselect all the others because I want to save more space. When you’re done customising your installation, it is come to the point of no turning back : Installation process. Once you hit the Install button, you can no longer stop the process.

Installation Customise option page

10. After you hit the Install button, the installation will start to process.

Early installation process

The total time required for the process

Almost done. 10 more minutes

11. Once the installation process is done, the system will be rebooted.

System reboot

12. And this is my login screen. It seems that the upgrading process revert my custom background to their new default background.

The login menu

13. Once you enter logged in, you will be greeted with Mac OS X animation and the Mac OS X Setup Assistant.

Mac OS X Setup Assistant

14. And now, you’re done! Congratulation! You should have something like this.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard : 10.6

15. Now, enjoy your new version of Mac OS X and have fun!