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
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