kcarlin's Journal: Mac OS X Rebuild

Under OS X 10.4 I just had the experience of having to rebuild the OS on my laptop after 16 months of heavy use. I was experiencing mysterious memory access errors during network use and tried reinstalling the OS as a late resort. The consumer portion of the reinstall took 3 hours starting from a 10.4 install disk and pulling updates down a highspeed DSL line to apply 10.4.8 and all the latest goodies.

Missing from the experience was the need to reinstall any of my applications (as is typical, thanks largely to the registry, under Windows). And reassert most or all of my preferences (as is also typical under Windows). The reinstall even retained my old system files in case I wanted to further isolate the problem.

No more vacation weekends spent looking for install disks? Trying to remember every important preference setting I might have used in the last x years? Less dead time to explain to clients when a laptop goes south?

Of course, I would rather that the system had "just worked", to coin a phrase. But 16 months is 10 months longer than I have ever gone without having to rebuild on a Windows-based laptop, with 3 being more the norm.

The only real gotchya in the process was that, the laptop being younger than 10.4, it could not use the built-in touchpad pointing device. Solution? Plugged a trackball into a USB port and rolled right along.

Good job.

[Epilogue: Replaced the drive for a new one with twice the capacity, and the laptop has gone from middle aged to a randy kid again. This was the first time I actually hired somebody to work on a Mac for me, the disk replacement procedure is absolutely hideous. Remember to check your logs for Error -36 on occasion.]