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MattA

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 15, 2006
485
231
Orlando, FL
My wife has an early '09 24" iMac (3.06Ghz/GT130/4GB/1TB) that was operating perfectly with Snow Leopard. After installing Lion, it has become really unstable. It freezes often requiring a reboot, and occasionally it will kernel panic with a gray screen. I'm thinking it's possible that when the upgrade occurred, it didn't install everything correctly.

I would like to reinstall Lion fresh on the machine. I really don't want to lose any data, as she has hundreds of GB worth of photos/music/documents. I'm tempted to wipe her time machine disk and do a completely fresh backup before I attempt a reinstall.

What is the process for doing this? I'm afraid that if I use migration assistant and allow it to reload from time machine that it will restore whatever was causing the problem in the first place. The object is to have a completely fresh copy but keep all data.

Any thoughts?
 
When using migration assistant, you could try restoring her user account and data but not the system settings.
 
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