OS-X Reinstall

[robbo100]

Hi all,

I have had a MacBook for about 4 years now (unibody 2 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB DDR3 RAM running OS-X 10.6.8). It has gradually been slowing down, and the Hard Drive is full up with rubbish. I have of late (last 12 months) been suffering with problems connecting to the shared drives on my network and am needing to force quite programs quite regularly. Therefore I have decided to wipe the hard drive and install Mountain Lion onto it (I am pretty sure that Mountain Lion is supported).

My question is, how is the best way of going about the following:

- How do I best backup my mail folders and rules?

- Will I be able to install Mountain Lion as a fresh install on a blank drive, or will I have to keep my current install before I run the install so that it detects my existing software version (in which case will it then allow me to blank the hard drive)?

- I am not particularly bothered about keeping photos and videos etc (since they are all backed up), but are their any files I should really consider backing up that I might not have thought about - e.g. Keychain etc?

Thanks

Robbo100

 

[robbo100]

Oh, another thought:

Will my iPhone be music blanked? If so, what should I backup to keep the iPhone setting the same?

Thanks again

Robbo100

 

[Deleted member 27989]

Sync your iPhone first

Backup using timemachine

Create a USB install for mountain lion, boot from it and use disk utility to wipe the hard drive. Then install.

Use migration assistant to restore your data.

Job done.

 

[robbo100]

Thanks,

So I presume that Time Capsule will let me selectively recover files to the clean install? I don't really want to bring back the vast majority of the files as I plan to run a far cleaner hard drive in the future?

Thanks

Robbo100

 

[Deleted member 27989]

Thanks,

So I presume that Time Capsule will let me selectively recover files to the clean install? I don't really want to bring back the vast majority of the files as I plan to run a far cleaner hard drive in the future?

Thanks

Robbo100

In short yes, you can choose to just bring your 'home directory' back. There is no reason to be selective with your files as there is no reason why that should slow down the machine.

In fact there is actually no reason to perform a reinstall if the machine is feeling slow. Unless there are launchagents and daemons in your \Library or ~\Library it will run exactly the same.

You could potentially just do a Disk Utility and repair permissions, perhaps use Onyx to clear your cache (although that should slow down the machine as it will have to rebuild it)...But that is about it...It is not like Windows where the registry and the likes grows and starts complaining after a while.

Hope that helps.

 

[robbo100]

Thanks

There are a couple of things not working well on my Mac, for example, if I try to reboot it never does (it gets part way through shutdown and hangs), and I have to reboot to get access to windows shares on a regular basis, so something is not right. I have tried repairing permission and upgraded to the latest version of OS-X, but this has not fixed it. I figure that I need to go to the next step (although normally I wouldn't expect to have to do with with a Mac).

Cheers

Robbo100

 

[Deleted member 27989]

I would look in the Console to see what is causing that, as that is not normal. It is most likely to do with it closing down its network and not able to find those windows shares. Just fix that will most likely fix your reboot as well. Console with syslog should give you the answers...

 

[philbot]

One fix-all that I use at work it to dump all your caches.

These are in 3 places:

Macintosh HD / Library / Caches

Macintosh HD / System / Library / Caches

Macintosh HD / Users / (your-user) / Library / Caches


Just restart while holding the shift key, and you mac will start in a 'safe mode'

Now dump all the caches into the wastebasket and restart and it will fix most of the usual slowdowns.


Your Mac will rebuild any caches it needs so don't worry about that.

 

[robbo100]

Just to update the thread. I went against the general advice (sorry) and did a full reinstall after setting up a spare old hard drive as a Time Machine backup.

It all went very well indeed, with the exception the Mail. Mountain Lion Mail directories are in a different format to the previous version, so I could not port across all the settings and mail by reinstating the files directly from the backup. I was however able to import the old mail from the backup using the mail import option.

The MacBook is now running very quickly indeed. Like the day I brought it home!

Thanks for the help

Robbo100

 

[Deleted member 27989]

Good to hear it works