I finally installed Mac OS X Lion on my main drive today. A wee bit earlier than my original plan of installing Lion only after iCloud comes out. The reason is that I’m starting a new project and I’d better make use of the latest tools and APIs that are available to me. It wasn’t a smooth process, I hit a snag with the migration assistant – more on that after the jump.

So I uninstalled my HP ScanJet 3500c Scanning Software, which depends on Rosetta, removed Parallels Desktop 5, and removed my BootCamp partition. I installed Windows XP in that partition since I bought the machine four years ago, but never used it for anything serious – played a game or two borrowed from the library but that’s it. Since my game needs (and allocated time) are being satisfied by iOS games nowadays, there isn’t much use dual-booting to Windows any more. Sadly, after removing my BootCamp partition, Disk Utility won’t allow me to resize the main partition to use the empty space, so I had to reformat the entire drive. Not really a big problem since I can restore my data and applications from my Time Machine drive.

Then I installed Lion and everything was pretty much in order initially. Until the time I tried to use the Migration Assistant. After running for about three hours, the Migration Assistant stuck in the last minute, literally, during the copying files that supports applications phase. It stuck there in saying that there was “one minute remaining” but actully lasted for many hours.

I googled around and found an answer suggesting that I disable Spotlight from indexing both the main drive and the source drive from which Migration Assistant reads data from. Sorry but I forgot the original article’s URL. Then I reboote, reformatted the drive again (for fear that there are already dangling files copied from my Time Machine drive) and try installing Lion again. Apparently the suggestion works, this time the Migration Assistant was able to restore all my files.

Afterwards I install Java that is needed to access my dayjob’s VPN. I also installed Adobe Flash, needed to access Google Analytics. Then I re-enabled Spotlight, installed iTunes 10.5 Beta, and run Mail. While I’m writing this, Spotlight is still in the middle of indexing my main drive and Mail is updating my mailbox.

Lesson learned is that always disable Spotlight before you start migrating into a freshly-installed system. Also you should only try OS updates when you have a day to spare and fast Internet connection to update stuff that are not installed by default

Here are the steps to disable Spotlight correctly:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Time Machine
3. Click on Options
4. Add both of your your boot drive and your system drive to the Exclude these items from backups box
5. Restart your Mac

After disabling Spotlight, you can run the Migration Assistant again to restore your files. This time it should work.

Till next time. Take care.