disc repair prior to upgrading 10.6.8 to Mountain Lion?

[sybawi]

Hi,

My 'old' macbook ('09) needs an update desperately (too many beachballs), time to prepare a clean install & upgrade, to Lion at least.

I read the stickyhttp://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html on trouble shooting, and some other 'literature' on the web concerning what to take care of prior to installing.

Using Maintenance, I discovered that my disc needs repair. Should I perform that prior to all of the other steps? Or is backing-up, cleaning out cache, updating programs, and then installing Lion implicitly going to take care of that issue as well?

If necessary, an additional problem is that my superdrive seems to be broken, so I'd need to run Disc Utility from another volume. Can that be done from USB, or better use another mac/disc?

Thanks!

MacBook Pro Intel 2.66 Intel core 2 Duo, 4GB, OS X 10.6.8.

 

[chscag]

Perform as much maintenance as you can before doing anything else. Also make sure you have a current backup of your data as the first thing to do.

You might also consider getting a new hard drive for your MacBook Pro. Usually when a drive begins to need repairs, it's a sign that it may fail. As far as updating to Lion goes, you can certainly do that if you can find a copy. It's no longer available from the Mac App store. Your MacBook Pro should be able to run Mountain Lion.

The broken optical drive is going to be a problem though. You might be better off buying an external optical drive (they're inexpensive) if needed. Mountain Lion is a direct download and installation from the Mac App store so the drive won't be necessary for that.

 

[harryb2448]

And if you purchase Mountain Lion make a bootable USB flash drive using LionDiskMaker before running the Installer. You can boot from the USB drive and run Repair Disk from there.