Hi Mark and Others, I was curious about this question, since there are some Macs that can be upgraded to Lion, but not Mountain Lion, and the USB thumb drives for Lion are no longer being sold (except at exorbitant prices on eBay). Intego, the company that sells security products for the Mac, published an article shortly after Mountain Lion's release: "What to Do if Your Mac Can’t Run Mountain Lion" http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/what-to-do-if-your-mac-cant-run-mountain-lion/
They listed the following categories: <begin quote> Mountain Lion Capable Macs Mountain Lion requires one of the following Macs with at least 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of available hard drive space: • iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) • MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) • MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) • MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) • Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) • Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) • Xserve (Early 2009) Lion Capable Macs If your Mac isn’t new enough to run Mountain Lion, it should still be able to run Lion if you have one of the Mac models listed below, as long as it has at least 2 GB of RAM and 7 GB of free hard drive space: • iMac (Late 2006 or Early 2008) • MacBook (Late 2006 or any 2007 or 2008 model) • MacBook Air (all models) • MacBook Pro (Late 2006) • Mac mini (Mid 2007) • Mac Pro (all models) • Xserve (Late 2006 or Early 2008) <end quote> A check of the Apple Discussion forums showed that if you are in this situation, you can get Lion by contacting Apple directly: "If you need to purchase Lion call 1-800-692-7753 or 1-800-676-2775. Ask for a Sales Representative. They will check your Apple ID, and email you a code and instructions. The cost is $29.99 (as it was before) plus tax. It's a download." The toll-free 800 numbers apply for the U.S. and Canada only, I think, but there should be a similar process for users outside the U.S. (And in Mark's case, the 800 numbers will work.) If you can upgrade to Mountain Lion by purchasing from the App Store at the same price of $29.99, they'd prefer you to do so, especially since maintaining current security updates are focused on the newest operating systems. Once you have updated to either Lion or Mountain Lion you can make a bootable clone or an installer on a USB thumb drive or DVD that will work for any of your Macs. I used Carbon Copy Cloner for this (paid, but with a 30-day free trial), but you can read through the archives for discussions about using Apple's Lion Recovery Disk Assistant or Lion Diskmaker (both of which will work for Lion and Mountain Lion). You can also review the MacWorld article by Don Frakes, "How to make a bootable Mountain Lion install drive" http://www.macworld.com/article/1167857/how_to_make_a_bootable_mountain_lion_install_drive.html An install drive is different from a bootable clone (backup). You can find out more about backup solutions by reading the guide "Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac". As a mac-access list member you're eligible to purchase this at an 80% discount. For a more accessible list of their titles than the default Take Control catalog list display provides, check out this URL: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/catalog-accessible The table columns are simpler to negotiate with VoiceOver, and you can just activate links of titles you want to view in more detail with VO-Space or by pressing your up + down arrow keys if you're in QuickNav mode. Incidentally, I remember that when Lion came out Eric was searching for a solution for backing up a Bootcamp partition, but the offerings at the time were limited, and he ended up switching to VMWare Fusion. In March of this year, Winclone came back as a (paid) solution for backing up a Bootcamp partition, provided you have formatted as NTFS. For more information, check the developer's site at twocanoes software: http://twocanoes.com/software.php?software=1 HTH. Cheers, Esther <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>