wanted a bit of help doing a clean install but don’t wanna lose any off app documents etc. i upgraded to lion via the app store ever since that my Mac has really slowed down 4gb ram 2.2 ghz core 15 been on a lot of forums and i think this would hopefully fix or do you think the new mountain lion upgrade might fix and how do u install once there new software clean install
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Brendan Norris
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How Do I Do A Clean Install Of Lion?
Comments: 14 Responses to “How Do I Do A Clean Install Of Lion?”
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Doing a clean install is a pretty extreme measure. I don't recommend it unless you have exhausted every other possibility. I've got a lot of Macs and I can't remember the last time I had to do a truly clean install.
First I would try to figure out what the problem really is. Check your login items. See what else you have running with Activity Monitor. There must be something that is slowing it down. And it is most likely not Lion, but something else you have installed. Or, maybe something simple like being close to out of hard drive space.
Before doing a clean install, try a normal install. Just installing Lion over Lion. DO this my restarting with the Option key held down, then you should be able to boot from the special Recovery partition. (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718)
Actually, from there you may want to use Disk Utility to check your drive for problems. Then you can do an install of Lion over Lion (not a clean install, just a re-install of the OS).
Of course backup before any of this. But you are already backing up with Time Machine, right? Maybe even do a second backup by cloning your drive to another external drive.
You can do a clean install that way too. But then be prepared for hours (or days) of re-installing your apps and getting everything back the way you want it -- it you are like me and have tons of applications and such.
Still got 250 gb of free space will doing the lion thing over the lion I already have lose anything on my Mac I can name out the apps I have installed to see if u think it might be one of them I have try the disc utility and it's says no problems apps are : caffeine clean my Mac copy paster google chrome drop box iCal cleaner Evernote twitter debuting souncloud Skype debuting ringer Microsoft office mental case
Plenty there that could be causing trouble. But impossible to say without seeing it first-hand.
does normal install lose any of your app etc maybe it a app how will i pin point the problem still got 250gb hard drive space..
login items ? checked drive for any problems seems to be ok
A normal install of OS X over OS X doesn't affect the rest of your drive (apps, docs, etc). See episode 551 (http://macmost.com/login-items.html) and 349 (http://macmost.com/fixing-a-slow-mac.html)
It's ironic that I just did a clean install of Lion today on my 13 MPB mid 2009 model. The reason for my install was because I was upgrading to a bigger hard drive and decided after reading many post that a clean install may work best for me because I was getting a lot of pinwheels and had only 18GB of free space free on the original HD.
I replaced the HD with a 500GB 7200 and replaced the memory from 4GB to 8GB. I had made a Lion install on a thumb drive, a time machine backup and also made a SuperDuper clone of my data before starting the upgrade.
I placed the new HD into a USB 2.0 enclosure case, plugged it into my MPB and formatted the new HD using disk utility, installed Lion from the thumb drive then used Migration Assistance to transfer my data from my MPB to the new HD. powered off the MPB installed the the new HD and all is working well. My data and all setting are as was before, but now on a bigger hard drive and no pinwheels as of this writing.
If I did not need a bigger hard drive I would have done what you suggested Gary to Brendan. because the pinwheels was really annoying me. Thanks for all the information you give us Gary, your great!
Anu helps good just un sure what my best option is to do
You "best" option is to take it to an expert if you are not comfortable with troubleshooting this sort of thing. Like you would take your car to the mechanic or call an expert to fix a major appliance. Not everyone is an computer engineer -- don't feel that your only option is to fix it yourself.
Ok thank u so much for your great help wit out u there would be just no help big thumbs up for the great work you do Gary what the best way to install mountain lion when it's out ?
Looks like the ONLY way to get Mountain Lion will be via the Mac App Store.
Ok so don't delete the existing lion just install mountain lion when it finally available in the app store when do u think it will be out
Apple has said "end of summer." If you are having trouble, I wouldn't wait. I'd try to get it fixed now.
Thanks again 4 your time here from Australia you do a great job
I did a clean install of Lion. I got a larger disk. I also had WinXP as bootcamp on the old hard disk. But Lion does not support bootcamp XP. So I installed Lion with Win 7 as bootcamp and a virtual disk (Parallel) with XP. But I had so many files and programs installed over the years that I never use and just do not get rid of. The clean install also meant that the Spotlight search was covering only the new material that I added.
The biggest problem I had was recovering email. The tools were there it just took time. I did shed some very old email in the process. I now have more disk space and once I got Lion configured to my viewing pleasure I am now happy with Lion. But I did have to configure it. Your videos helped me uncover ways to make the software work for me. That is what it is suppose to do. I usually have XP running concurrent wit Lion. Parallels has worked well for me in this area.