- used CarbonCopyCloner to clone my SSD to a nice 1TB drive on a Firewire 800 dock.
- booted from the external drive into my clone OS.
- opened Disk Utility and selected the SSD.
- ran the “erase” function on the SSD.
- ran the partition function – selecting 1 partition for the volume scheme.
- repeated the partition with 16 partitions
- reduced the drive back to one Mac OS Extended Journaled partition.
- erased free space on the drive (seems unnecessary in retrospect)
- clicked on the “New Image” icon at the top of Disk Utility’s screen. I selected the SSD as the target volume and made a DMG file to the size of the SSD itself, 128.04GB. Disk Utility created the image and the SSD was left with about 21.61MB remaining. I repeated the action with a 21.6MB image file on the SSD. This left the SSD with only a few KB of empty space. Sufficient.
- insterted the OS X Snow Leopard DVD in my MacBook Pro and rebooted to the installation DVD. I ran the OS X setup as a new computer, not using the CarbonCopyCloner image. I figured a fresh installation would eliminate any detritus from tons and tons of use. I was right. The fresh copy was much better.
during the Snow Leopard installation process, I opted to import settings, apps, emails and documents from the 1TB clone. OS X put everything in perfect order for me. My work environment was back to the way it had started.
