Leopard Spotlight: the upgrade disc gripe

Okay, I just have to vent something, but it might be of interest to others as well. As I mentioned earlier, I picked up a new 24" iMac on Leopard Day. Being old stock, it had Tiger on it, but it included a "Mac OS X v10.5 CPU Drop-in Kit" disc in the box. I figured this would just be the same kind of disc as the retail copy of Leopard, but it turns out this is not the case. This disc is upgrade only. When you run the Leopard installer it says that Tiger must already be installed on the machine. Further, it does not offer the standard installation options (Archive and Install, Erase and Install, and Upgrade); it only offers Upgrade.

OK, you say, of course, so what? Just put the disc in and upgrade the virgin Tiger install. Yes, and I did that. But something happened to my machine over the weekend that I could not fix and I had to do a complete wipe and re-install. Here I hit a snag: since the Leopard disc was upgrade only, I actually first had to re-install Tiger and then upgrade to Leopard. This seems completely asinine to me, not to mention a big waste of time. Why should I have to install Tiger before I can install Leopard? Particularly if I ever have to reinstall again — e.g. if I want to wipe the hard drive before I sell the computer — I'll have to go through the same process again.

Anyway, now that I've got that off my chest, I thought it might be worth sharing with others, because the same situation will presumably affect both people who buy out the remaining stock of Tiger pre-installed Macs as well as anybody who takes advantage of the OS X up to date program we've posted on before (though I don't know this for sure). So don't be surprised if your Leopard discs come the same way.

Update: It may be that I jumped the gun here. Apparently the three installation options are there–I must just not have looked hard enough. The upgrade disc, however, does seem to require a previous Tiger install (i.e. it won't work on a newly formatted hard drive).