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Importance of a Clean Install

jayducharme

jayducharme

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 22, 2006
4,772
6,926
The thick of it
After hours on the phone with Apple tech support over the past few days, my SL issues (apps repeatedly crashing) have been resolved. It seems the problem was that I upgraded. The original SL install DVD I bought was defective and corrupted my hard drive. Even though I exchanged the DVD and reinstalled, from that point on I was upgrading a corrupt system. The Apple tech walked me through using disc utility on the DVD to wipe the system hard drive, repartition it and install a virgin copy of SL. What a difference! The install took about 20 minutes instead of nearly an hour. And all my apps now are blazingly fast.

The tech advised me NOT to use Time Machine to recover all my files and settings, but to manually drag over what I need. So far so good. It was a pain, but if the system is finally stable, I'm happy.
 
I don't see how this goes to the importance of a clean install. Your defective DVD was the culprit. If you had attempted a clean install w/ the defective DVD you'd still have gotten the same results.

Truth is the installer's DVD checker should have discovered your DVD was bad. Did you run that or elect to skip that part and go ahead w/ the install? Just curious as to the effectiveness of the DVD checker.
 
Chupa Chupa said:
I don't see how this goes to the importance of a clean install. Your defective DVD was the culprit. If you had attempted a clean install w/ the defective DVD you'd still have gotten the same results.

Truth is the installer's DVD checker should have discovered your DVD was bad. Did you run that or elect to skip that part and go ahead w/ the install? Just curious as to the effectiveness of the DVD checker.
Click to expand...

+1

In fact, other Apple technicians have told me that there is no need to do a clean install unless the system has been corrupted which is what happened in your case. With an uncorrupted DVD an upgrade would have been fine....
 
numbersyx said:
With an uncorrupted DVD an upgrade would have been fine....
Click to expand...

You're correct. But if I had started with a clean install, it probably wouldn't have take a week to discover what the problem really was. I had assumed that an upgrade with a clean disk would have repaired any problems the system had.

Incidentally, Safari just crashed on me again. So maybe I'm not out of the woods just yet.... :(
 
Sorry but I am always an advocate of the "nuke and pave" solution.

Yes it takes longer, however any minor issues are sorted. I had a perfect DVD of SL, upgraded over my perfect Leo installation and had issues with Safari and other apps. A format and re-install combined with a data drag over from my backup drive, and all is as it should be.
 
Its really personal preference.

if we're talking about MS windows, well then that's a different ball of wax, but apple has its act together and going the upgrade route is perfectly safe.

My personal preference is to go the clean install route, mostly because then that cleans stuff out of the ~/Library folder of crap that I've installed/uninstalled. Plus I repartitioned my drive so better utilize the space between OSX and Ubuntu.
 
Upgrade may be fine, but using Time Machine for a full backup of the system is the root cause of my system yielding 1m15s boot times, and 20s shutdowns.

After a clean install and piece by piece TM backups, my system is more stable and the boot and shutdown times are now 35s, and 4s, respectively.

Don't know what it is about TM, but the Apple tech knows enough to avoid using it for a full system backup.
 
jayducharme said:
The tech advised me NOT to use Time Machine to recover all my files and settings, but to manually drag over what I need. So far so good. It was a pain, but if the system is finally stable, I'm happy.
Click to expand...

Where did you manually drag files from??? From your last Time Machine Backup Folder???

Or from your Old system to an External Drive and then back to your new System???

My question essentially is, if I clean install SL, Can I then go to my Time Machine Drive and to the last backup made and manually copy files from there through the finder??? Or it can't be done and I need to re-backup my old system first using something like Carbon Copy Clone???
 
odedh said:
Where did you manually drag files from??? From your last Time Machine Backup Folder???

Or from your Old system to an External Drive and then back to your new System???

My question essentially is, if I clean install SL, Can I then go to my Time Machine Drive and to the last backup made and manually copy files from there through the finder??? Or it can't be done and I need to re-backup my old system first using something like Carbon Copy Clone???
Click to expand...
My question exactly, I did a clean install and a Timemachine recover and so far so good, however I'm a wh*re for speed :cool:
 
Richard1028 said:
But this implies to upgrading any OS and isn't specific to SL.
Click to expand...

Doesn't apply to any other OS because only OSX has Time Machine, so yes, it is specific to to SL in the results of my install.

Again. After 2 installs using TM full backup/restore, one install upgrade, and one clean. my boot times were crap, and system performance glitchy.

After a clean install and very limited TM backups, my boot/shutdown times were more than halved, and the system runs smoothly without any stutters or graphics anomalies.

SL may not be the root cause, so being defensive of SL is pointless. My guess is TM full restore/backup is the root cause.
 
odedh said:
Where did you manually drag files from??? From your last Time Machine Backup Folder?
Click to expand...

Not trusting Time Machine after what the tech told me, I first dragged to a spare hard drive any files I wanted to save. After the re-install I dragged them all back (mostly stuff from my Documents folder). For any files that I missed, I browsed to my TM drive and explored it's folders. Everything from my old system was there. I didn't drag over any programs or system files, though. The tech said not to. Then I erased the TM drive and created a new backup.

But this is the first time I had to go through his on a Mac. My PowerPC machines were rock solid and never gave me problems. I've only been having trouble since the switch to Intel.
 
I did a clean install and transferred from a superduper cloned drive. Really effective. Very stable and I am very happy.

The only thing I had to do was re-install a copy of my drobo dashboard. It worked OK but when I tries to upgrade the drobo's firmware it wouldn't do it. Problems with the update file would not recognise the SL version of my user account.

But it was a minor thing- took five minutes to fix. All is working well.
 
Guess what?
I did the normal upgrade install. And no problems.
Starts up in about 30 seconds and shuts down in about 7 seconds. maybe less for the shutdown.

I don't see the point of a fresh install. not after upgrading it. It has gone smooth.

I just need to update my Time Machine drive.
 
stevetim said:
Doesn't apply to any other OS because only OSX has Time Machine, so yes, it is specific to to SL in the results of my install.

Again. After 2 installs using TM full backup/restore, one install upgrade, and one clean. my boot times were crap, and system performance glitchy.

After a clean install and very limited TM backups, my boot/shutdown times were more than halved, and the system runs smoothly without any stutters or graphics anomalies.

SL may not be the root cause, so being defensive of SL is pointless. My guess is TM full restore/backup is the root cause.
Click to expand...

I was curious about this exact thing. I did an upgrade to SL and then did a reformat / install of SL with my time machine backup. It seems to be a little quicker ... maybe 5-9 seconds... but I wonder if going "fresh" by dragging items from a backed up drive is faster than re-installing from time machine. Guess that has been a question of mine for a while.
 
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