Installing OS X (Leopard)
Sunday, May 3, 2009 at 3:05PM | Print Article I recently upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro and therefore needed to re-install OS X.
The first step is to locate your OS X installation disc(s). If you got OS X with your Mac then you will probably have two discs, one is the operating system and the second includes iLife. If you bought OS X separately then you will have a single DVD that will only include the operating system.
Switch on your Mac and insert the OS X disc (disc one if you have two). Whilst on the boot screen hold "c" to invoke the boot menu. This will automatically select the "boot from DVD" option. If you have installed a new hard drive you may initially be greeted with an error symbol (shown below), don't let this concern you.
The OS X disc will now copy the needed setup files into memory, this may take a few minutes. To help complete the installation process I have created a video. The whole process can take up to 1h 30mins depending on your specification.
The only area that may differ in your installation is the "Select a Destination" screen. As you can see in my video I had no available drive to install OS X to. This was because my hard drive was new and therefore not partitioned. As a result I needed to run "Disk Utility" from "Utilities" and partition my hard drive as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" - "GUID Partition Table". If you are just re-installing OS X you will probably only need to format your existing partition as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" which can be done from the previously mentioned "Disk Utility" menu.
Finally, once OS X has finished installing I recommend you run "Software Update" to ensure that you get all the latest software patches/fixes.