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Reinstalling Leopard and data migration

V

V0LTR0NN

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 15, 2008
8
0
Hello,

I am troubleshooting an issue right now and may need to reinstall Leopard on my Mac Mini. I am new to Mac so please forgive my n00b questions.

  • I have 1 USB drive and 1 FireWire drive attached. The USB drive is my Time Machine backup drive and all of my Data is on the FireWire drive.
  • I am not backing up ALL of my data with Time Machine due to lack of Hard Drive space, so its important to know that I will not get back all of my data by just doing a time machine restore...
  • I do have permissions set up on my FireWire drive that contains all of my data.
  • I do not want to transfer any of my settings over after I reinstall OS X however I do want to ensure that I do not lose any data.
  1. What is the best way to go about reinstalling Leopard and ensure I do not lose my data due to wacky permissions issues?
  2. If I just unplug my FireWire (Data) drive and re-install Leopard, then after the reinstall hook the FireWire drive back up will I run into any permission problems?


Thanks for any help you can give :)
 
Just pop in the Leopard DVD and choose "archive and install" when prompted. I believe there is an option immediately underneath to preserve user and network settings, which you should also select. That's all you should need to do. It'll handle the backup on its own, and you won't need to use your Time Machine drive. Neat, eh?
 
Thanks for the responce. I do NOT want to save my user settings as my user settings may be causing my issue. If I DO NOT select that option will this still preserve all of my data on the external drive?

Bad thing about having only one MAC is that I can not set this up in a test environment. I really do not feel like gambling and losing all of my important data. I also dont feel like backing everything back up to DVD either :)
 
That is my question....

I am new to MAC so not sure what to do. On a windows box I would just unplug my external data and reinstall. Plug my data drive back in and be all set .... HOWEVER. I have read that MAC permissions arent so friendly (i have permissions set up on my external data drive). So the question is, would this be an option? Would plugging my drive in after the reinstall fail me due to permissions?

Also a side question. Is there any documentation anywhere that claims what a reinstall with keep user settings really does?

THanks for any help.
 
charlesbronsen said:
I'm not sure what you mean by installing permissions on your external.... splain Lucy splain:p
Click to expand...


I have rights, or permissions (or whatever the mac term is for locking down files and folders) set on all of my data on my external drive.
 
thanks... Still would like to know if anyone knows the answer to my questions for sure.

Thanks,
 
If you think there's going to be a problem with permissions, you could always change permissions for the files on the FW drive to all user access temporarily, and change it later. You can use free tool batchmod for this.
 
V0LTR0NN said:
Thanks for the responce. I do NOT want to save my user settings as my user settings may be causing my issue. If I DO NOT select that option will this still preserve all of my data on the external drive?
Click to expand...

It won't affect your external drive. I still suggest doing an archive and install, but without selecting the preserve option. Of course, if your user settings aren't causing the problem, it's a lot easier to hang onto them. Being that a fresh install only takes 20 minutes or so, I'd suggest trying an install while keeping the settings first. If that doesn't work, you can run another archive and install, while telling it not to keep the settings.
 
Thanks Blue....

will my applications remain if i do the archive setting?

Since i have specific permissions set up on my drive will i still have access to my files? Or would it be better of changing them all to all user (i have quite a few permissions set up)
 
If you preserve, your applications will remain. Otherwise, everything will be dumped into a subdirectory on your computer, and you'll have to reinstall everything.

Your permissions shouldn't affect the install, but you might lose your custom permissions. I've never really dealt with that, so I can't comment.
 
Thanks. I guess it cant hurt to try to keep all setting the first time. I do have custom permissions set up. And I used an application (I cant remember which, not at home) to set my permissions on my data drive. Do you know a safe way to restore the permissions to a Everone Read Execute permission level before upgrading as a just in case?
 
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