I’m reinstalling OS X 10.5
I’m nervous, but my iMac has been shady lately. iTunes will crash hard every few days. My instance of Safari uses all the CPU cycles when Stephanie is logged in, lots of general weirdness and unhappiness.
I’ve been trying everything I can think of to diagnose the problem: i’ve stopped all unnecessary apps from running in the background, I read crash logs throughly, no idea what was causing all the seize ups. Finally, last week I decided it was time to reinstall Leopard.
This shit made me nervous as hell. In addition to something going wrong and losing data, my biggest concern is actually about my iTunes library. My entire iTunes existence is based around ratings. My phone contains only songs with a top rating. All my smart playlists exclude songs with low ratings. I’ve got best of playlists for the big three genres (Jazz, Rock, Electronic).
Turns out reinstalling Leopard is easy as pie.
Step 1: Use Time Machine to back up your machine. I switched the backup location from my usual 750GB hard drive to a different one, so I now have three copies of my iMac.
Step 2: Insert Leopard DVD, double click on install, select restart.
Step 3: When the computer finishes restarting choose “Restore from Backup” from the menu bar. Pick a source and a destination.
That’s it! The entire process took about 6 hours for a 500 GB hard drive. When I logged in for the first time after the reinstall, everything was exactly as I had left it, except, oddly enough, the background reset to the default Leopard Aurora background. Other then that, everything is working exactly the same as before, minus all the shit going wrong.
Only thing I haven’t checked is if Leopard still refuses to restart while my MyBook firewire drive is plugged in.