On reinstalling OS X Leopard

October 17, 2009 / Worth it, but definitely shouldn’uh hadtuh.

Finally got the scanner working again

The short version goes something like: worth it in the end, but shouldn’uh hadtuh…

Longer version

Reinstalling Leopard using Erase and Install fixed every problem I listed a few weeks ago with the exception of vhosts which I had to recreate because of an architectural change in Leopard:

1. Airport connects on wake.
2. Mail.app syncs on wake.
3. VPN is working again.
4. Video artefacts have gone.
5. Safari has chilled out.
6. Command + Tab switching works.
7. My business is fast.

What I did:

1. Cloned startup disk using SuperDuper! and confirmed it was bootable.
2. Launched the installer, restarted and chose Erase and Install.
3. Created a new admin account.
4. Selectively copied user data for some (mostly-Apple) apps^† and additional fonts using Adam Rosen’s guidelines.
5. Reinstalled additional applications from scratch^‡ intentionally leaving the cruft behind.
6. Cloned the new startup disk, tested it and scheduled nightly backups.
7. Added the printer.
8. Added the scanner.
9. Blogged about it.

Would I recommend you do it if you have mad problems resulting from a regular upgrade? Yes. Should you have to? Nope. It’s just the price you pay for love-needing the Apple.

† Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Mail and Safari. I also had to boot back into my old system to export data from Address Book and Transmit.

‡ Coda, MAMP, MarsEdit, NetNewsWire, Photoshop, Quicksilver, TextWrangler, Tinkertool, Transmit and something nasty from Cisco related to VPN.