Time Machine Backup

[w00t951]

I had severe account troubles on Snow Leopard, and today, the Mac partition became corrupt and unreadable. I have a very recent Time Machine backup of that user account, but I don't want to transfer the account itself. Can I just transfer applications, documents, and settings, and not the account itself? And how do I do a clean install of Mac Snow Leopard onto a hard drive with a previous installation of the OS?

 

[waloshin]

I had severe account troubles on Snow Leopard, and today, the Mac partition became corrupt and unreadable. I have a very recent Time Machine backup of that user account, but I don't want to transfer the account itself. Can I just transfer applications, documents, and settings, and not the account itself? And how do I do a clean install of Mac Snow Leopard onto a hard drive with a previous installation of the OS?

My suggestion to completly wipe out the harddrive is to use Gparted.

It's a live linux cd that runs in your ram.

 

[Thiol]

I had severe account troubles on Snow Leopard, and today, the Mac partition became corrupt and unreadable. I have a very recent Time Machine backup of that user account, but I don't want to transfer the account itself. Can I just transfer applications, documents, and settings, and not the account itself? And how do I do a clean install of Mac Snow Leopard onto a hard drive with a previous installation of the OS?

Yikes. That's an interesting question, and I think the short answer is no. Restoring a Time Machine backup requires restoring the snapshot of the entire backup at a given time. Now, there is a possible work around, which is to do a clean install and then manually transfer over only the Applications, Documents, System, etc. folders. This seems tedious and I personally would be afraid to forget to move something over.

Your second question is easier to answer. Boot off the Snow Leopard installation CD. Before installing the new OS, erase the hard drive using Disk Utility. Detailed instructions are here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3910