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How many times have you had to reinstall your OS

I have done it before for a new computer, but i have never done it becuase something got messed up, and i sometimes mess aorund with my mac's alot and they keep going....I love it,

Shadow
 
Every 2 months I reformat the drive. I keep all my saved stuff, (e-mails, mp3, movies) on separate partitions. I keep my c drive only for the OS.
 
seabass069 said:
Every 2 months I reformat the drive. I keep all my saved stuff, (e-mails, mp3, movies) on separate partitions. I keep my c drive only for the OS.
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This is Windows, right? There is no c drive on OS X.
 
Tech Tools screwed my system up and I had to take it into the Genius bar to get it fixed. That is the only time I've had to reinstall the OS and I no longer use Tech Tools for anything.
 
kasei said:
Tech Tools screwed my system up and I had to take it into the Genius bar to get it fixed. That is the only time I've had to reinstall the OS and I no long use Tech Tools for anything.
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I may be saying exactly that shortly. I'll be buying DiskWarrior tomorrow. My main drive won't boot.
 
I had to reinstall 10.2 once, i could not log in to the system. O and i had to reinstall 9.X Because it would not boot. I also reinstalled 10.3 after a hard drive failure
 
I hope this isn't thread jacking, but is resintalling pretty straightforward? My mac will arrive around friday and I want to install a faster drive as the main and move the one that came with it to secondary. Does the disc it comes up have all the software that will come with it like ilife?
 
Malfoy said:
I hope this isn't thread jacking, but is resintalling pretty straightforward? My mac will arrive around friday and I want to install a faster drive as the main and move the one that came with it to secondary. Does the disc it comes up have all the software that will come with it like ilife?
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Installing the operating system or application software isn't difficult. However, if you try to use the restore discs to restore to a drive other than the original pne, it might not work.
 
1. Clean Install and to learn
2. Remove Classic and some application clutter
3. Causing a Kernal Panic during a Software Update
 
bousozoku said:
I may be saying exactly that shortly. I'll be buying DiskWarrior tomorrow. My main drive won't boot.
Click to expand...

I have DiskWarrior on my system now, but I am very hesitant to use anything that rebuilds a directory and gives you an option to replace your old directory. Thankfully I had everything backed up, but it was still a pain to restore my system to its previous state.

I have used DiskWarrior once to rebuilt my system. I of course got down on my knees and prayed the entire time it was running hoping not to see a repeat of what happened before.
 
kasei said:
I have DiskWarrior on my system now, but I am very hesitant to use anything that rebuilds a directory and gives you an option to replace your old directory. Thankfully I had everything backed up, but it was still a pain to restore my system to its previous state.

I have used DiskWarrior once to rebuilt my system. I of course got down on my knees and prayed the entire time it was running hoping not to see a repeat of what happened before.
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Well, I'm not sure what else I'd like to use. DiskWarrior is trustworthy. Prosoft has two different products, which doesn't please me at all. Do you choose one or the other or both?

I'm currently copying data from one drive to the next and I'm surprised at how slow this old, standard equipment drive is, especially through the UltraATA interface.

I suppose I could re-install everything. I might as well restore this drive from the original discs too. :D Then, I should write a lot of DVDs and sell all my Macs and just use a PowerBook or maybe, pen and paper.
 
DaftUnion said:
...just wanted to see how it compared with my craptacular Windows XP installation...OS X kills it...hands down.
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O man, tell me about it.. I just spent most of a weekend wasting time reloading my TiVo PC. Thank god for dual-core CPU's. It takes my AMD system 16 min. to load XP Pro (before SP2 update). I had to load it 3 times... Tried to load Fedora, Debian, and Kubnutu- just didn't work.. had to go back to XP. Man, I hate XP.
OK, a funny side note. I just had to pick up a PC laptop (dell) so I could use PC Anywhere... When O when will Symantec make a version for OS X?? I can't believe I need a PC just for that.
 
When I first put Tiger on my iBook I found it extremely buggy, so I ended up re-installing Panther which in turn wiped the HD.

But after tasting Tiger, I just couldn't stay away, so I installed it again! I've been using it ever since. All in all things seem to be working pretty well. :)
 
for real

18 timies exactly. Due to hd failure random issues and a crappy system ( yes this pbis a piece of junk) ive called apple care numerous times to request a replacement but am nowdemanding a new system or my money back. meh.
 
Reinwhat?!?

Never man. I've had and still do, an original "Ice Book" from 2000 or 2001, I foget, and never had to reinstall. Only for major upgrades like from 9 to 10 to Jaguar. I've also owned one of the first 1.6 Ghz. G5's with no problems and now am on a 2.0 Ghz iMac. Reinstalling is an unusual occurrence from what I've heard, hence 1 of the reasons for being on this platform to begin with. At work I suffer with a MicroDell box thing, but have my Ice Book right beside it going wireless. I'll never go back!
 
twice in 2 years.
once when i upgraded to tiger (decided I wanted a clean install),
once when my hard disk went kaput.
 
Just once when upgrading from Panther to Tiger.

I did a clean install. Call me paranoid, but it's probably from my misguided youth when I owned a PC and an upgrade rather than a clean insteall killed things.
 
Except for upgrades, which don't count anyway, a grand total of zero reinstalls :)

I have been with OSX since 10.2, and have had only 2 kernel panics - both times due to a hardware conflict when I tried to sync my phone with the mac.
 
i do it increasingly often as my computers gets older and older. whenever it feels like the comp is too bogged down.
 
Finder/Spotlight problems

I have to reinstall the whole kaboodle everytime I (try) to restart –*all I get is the spinning beachball and the spotlight icon in the corner of the screen. That's it. No force quit, no reinstall over the top of existing settings/apps etc. – it always has to be a full erase and install. Then I restart –*and the same problem occurs!

Any ideas? I tried the whole finder p.list thing (moving the file/trashing the file) and that worked once about 5 months ago...

Mac OSX 10.4 with no software updates this time cause I tried that once and the machine crashed
 
geedee, you may need to start a new thread about this because I doubt many people will find it in here. :eek:

Nevertheless, do two things for me (please). :)


  1. Take out all RAM that wasn't installed by Apple.
  2. Instead of reinstalling the OS with the OSX disks, use Disk Utility from the Installer menu (I think) to Repair Disk (not permissions).


Hopefully this will reveal the cause of your problems. :)

Oh, and if you start a new thread, include more details about what sort of computer, what you use it for (apps and added hardware) etc. It'll make it easier for others to help troubleshoot.
 
unlike on Windows, the tried and true first step in troubleshooting is not to reinstall the OS. there are a handful of simple steps to diagnose and fix most OS X issues. Windows troubleshooting is not as simple and it is usually just faster and easier to reinstall the OS than to spend hours and hours figuring out what is actually wrong with it. i have been a Mac tech and consultant for a while now and i've never seen a case of a purely OS-based issues being resolved by reinstalling the OS, not on OS X anyway. OS 9 would have its share of corruptions in the System folder and replacing that was not unheard of. but for OS X, this is not common at all. my sister computer has been running like a champ with nothing but OS upgrades all the way up from OS 10.1, not bad. i hear Windows users and even new switchers all the time asking me to reinstall OS X for all these crazy reasons like "i have too many programs" or "my computer is slow, it's too full". i even had one recent customer completely erase the entire family's iTunes and iPhoto libraries because she felt it was "slowing down the computer". if you have less than 1 or 2 GB free then yes, OS X may start to slow or have some trouble but this was on a 250GB drive with about 200GB free space. i have to explain to them that the computer is meant to have all this stuff on it, "too many programs" does not exist. i can't believe what using Windows does to people.
 
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