How to "clean install" Snow Leopard

A friend's MacBook had slowed down to a snail's pace. Despite looking everywhere for the issue, streamlining everything I could, and yelling at it, it failed to accelerate to usable speed. So I recommended we start from scratch and build it back up with only the things she was using, free of all the other downloads and aborted installs of various software she never used or cared about. It also housed a prior system, and a PC migration from a few years back. All told, the computer was a bloated, duplicated whale of files and applications for what was essentially a light-load writer's computer.

So I backed up the essential parts of her system using Time Machine: documents (including her novel and decades of prior writing, published and unpublished), ten years of family photographs, a 41GB iTunes library, among other things, and then....backed it up again elsewhere, outside of Time Machine.

And again.

And just for good measure, once more time, to yet another drive. I wasn't going to be the (ex-)friend who lost her novel.

What I wanted to do was do the ol' "erase and install" that prior system software discs allowed you to do. But clicking around Snow Leopard left no obvious method for this. But instead of booting Snow Leopard while inside of Mac OS X, if you just directly reboot the computer off the disc itself (holding down the "c" button after the system chime, letting go when you see the Apple logo) you get a few more options. Once you've gone into the installer program, you'll see "Utilities" at the top, and if you select Disc Utility, you can see your hard drive. If you click on "erase" (like I did, with one hand over my eyes) you can wipe the drive clean with various security options, and then you can do a fresh install of Snow Leopard on your computer on a pristine hard drive.

Once you've done that, you can either transfer your files back in directly, or use the installer program's built-in migration utility to restore any or all files from Time Machine.

And now? The world awaits the Next Great American Novel, untragically unlost by yours truly.

View Tags

Categories

Hardware OS How-tos Tips and tricks Troubleshooting MacBook

A friend's MacBook had slowed down to a snail's pace. Despite looking everywhere for the issue, streamlining everything I could, and...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

27 Comments

Filter by:

MacBook01

Hi. I have a white MacBook and it's 120GB internal drive died (I do have a back-up of my data on an external drive). I just swapped the internal hard drive for a new 250GB one. I just moved and I cannot find my Apple System disks anywhere! I do have my Snow Leopard Disc but I cannot install it on the MacBook. The installer tells me that Leopard had to be on the drive. Well, my drive died and I can't find my system disks. What can I do? Thank you.

February 04 2010 at 12:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Roger Rabbi

Mrfine, you are a complete nincompoop. As it happens I have a MPB in all its aluminium goodness. Love it. But I also dual boot with Win7. Love it, too. They're both tools, & they both have flaws. Curiously, though, Win7 has proven to be significantly more stable than Snow Leopard, and has required a small fraction of the updates Snow Leopard has. Just saying.

My point, which you promptly proved, is that a lot of people get awfully worked up in their devotion to all-things-Apple, and it isn't necessarily warranted. And Apple hardware is DEFINITELY overpriced.

But thank you for your comments, I got quite a chuckle out of it. I don't recall ever being ignored with such vehemence. Shared your thoughts with a few of my peers, they chuckled too (well, snickered would be more accurate, if you understand the nuance). I heard the word "ninny" a couple of times. Marvelous!

January 31 2010 at 7:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ivan

I would be very mad if there was a snail on my computer... Just saying.

January 31 2010 at 4:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

adam

When trying to clean up your drive can you use Carbon Copy, start up your computer using the cloned hard drive, go into disk utility to format your hard drive, and do a fresh install from the snow leopard disk?

January 31 2010 at 11:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Eric Taylor

I've done a clean install of Snow Leopard on my iMac and MacbookAir (both 2009 models) recently and was pleasantly surprised that both seemed to run more efficiently with less spinning beachballs.

The main reason I started this with the iMac was the Magic Mouse swipe features would disappear periodically. This was completely fixed withe clean install.

I migrated from my Time Machine backup - worked perfectly.

January 31 2010 at 10:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Or you could just do an Archive and Install like it used to using Terminal for a little bit. See here: http://intlect.com/how-to-archive-and-install-os-x-snow-leopard/

January 31 2010 at 8:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Julius

How can the MB be any faster if you're simply restoring everything that's been on the old drive?

My 13" MBP seems to be quite slow, too, I am rather considering to get an SSD.

January 31 2010 at 7:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ecobore

Interestingly I just carbon copy cloned my start up disk to a new 500Gb drive in my MacPro and then removed the original start up disk. The machine is SO MUCH faster.. So the very fact that the new disk has a better ordered directory must be helping immensely...

January 31 2010 at 6:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Lancelot

AppZapper & Leopard Cache Cleaner are two great proggies to keep your system running great. I use LCC at least once a month & it does a great
job getting my system clean / performing maintenance & I always use AppZapper when I need to uninstall something. cleanapp is another good one to try. It's more menu driven which I like.

January 31 2010 at 3:59 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nigel

Interesting! Two questions please:

1. What would cause an old installation to slow down? And

2. Is migration utility able to give granular control over what you reimport? My impression was that time machine and/or MU would reimport any problem plists etc. Also can you copy files manually from the time machine backup? How are they stored!

Thanks for the advice!

Nigel

January 30 2010 at 9:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply