Formatting MBP with Lion - re-install questions

[TangoJuliet]

So my MBP has been acting funny since I upgraded to Lion (from Leopard then Snow). At times my keyboard will lock up and not work. I have to physically restart the machine and then it works fine. I also have been getting the pinwheel a ton in safari. I want to see if doing a clean install will fix things.

Before I get into doing the actual install I have some questions.

I don't want to use my time machine for backup or hook it to my iMac and sync it to that because I don't want some things on it like parallels, etc.

I use mail for everything and I have a ton of saved messages in there. Is there an easy way to copy everything over to the formatted machine?

I have all my photos saved on the iMac so once everything is setup I can just copy that file over. Same goes for music and other data files.

After those issues are secured then I want to go ahead and do the format and install. Whats the best way about doing that? I know there is some way you can do the install over the internet once the drive is wiped but not sure where to find the info on it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[r0k]

So my MBP has been acting funny since I upgraded to Lion (from Leopard then Snow). At times my keyboard will lock up and not work. I have to physically restart the machine and then it works fine. I also have been getting the pinwheel a ton in safari. I want to see if doing a clean install will fix things.

Before I get into doing the actual install I have some questions.

I don't want to use my time machine for backup or hook it to my iMac and sync it to that because I don't want some things on it like parallels, etc.

I use mail for everything and I have a ton of saved messages in there. Is there an easy way to copy everything over to the formatted machine?

I have all my photos saved on the iMac so once everything is setup I can just copy that file over. Same goes for music and other data files.

After those issues are secured then I want to go ahead and do the format and install. Whats the best way about doing that? I know there is some way you can do the install over the internet once the drive is wiped but not sure where to find the info on it.

Thanks in advance!

First of all, slow down. I have experienced corruption issues with mail.app and with iPhoto Library. Fortunately I had everything backed up elsewhere.

Are your photos in your iPhoto Library? If so, export them. Export them now. Put them somewhere safe and don't ever leave your only copy of anything sitting in iPhoto Library. You can try copying iPhoto Library to the other machine and open it there and browse to make sure everything is still there. This failed on me one time with a 67 GB iPhoto Library which is why I suggest caution. Since then, I keep my photos on a firewire drive and when I add them to iPhoto, I don't allow it to copy them to iPhoto library. These days I have an iPhoto Library with over 100 GB of photos but the iPhoto Library is less than 5 GB. A 20 to 1 ratio for all that faces, events and places metadata is not too shabby and I never have to think about losing the whole thing again.

Now on to mail.app. I upgraded my Mac and I did the following. I made a fresh Time Machine backup to a firewire drive. I then popped in a new hard drive, installed Snow Leopard and did migration from the fresh backup I had just made. Everything came back. Everything but mail.app. It wouldn't launch. I had to delete its 10 GB library file and all it's plist files and set my mail up all over again. No biggie as my mail lives on gmail and mobile me's servers anyway but what if my only copy had been in mail.app? Perish the thought.

I suggest you install Thunderbird and import all your mail to Thunderbird. You can then export it in a variety of formats, including unix mbox format which almost any email client can import. Now that you have it backed up, go ahead and try moving your stuff to your new machine.

Mail and iPhoto are the only two apps where I've had problems but I would be cautious about every app. Since you've got two machines and plenty of time (you aren't rushing this are you? ), with patience you should be able to wind up with everything you need safely on your new machine.

 

[TangoJuliet]

First of all, slow down. I have experienced corruption issues with mail.app and with iPhoto Library. Fortunately I had everything backed up elsewhere.

Are your photos in your iPhoto Library? If so, export them. Export them now. Put them somewhere safe and don't ever leave your only copy of anything sitting in iPhoto Library. You can try copying iPhoto Library to the other machine and open it there and browse to make sure everything is still there. This failed on me one time with a 67 GB iPhoto Library which is why I suggest caution. Since then, I keep my photos on a firewire drive and when I add them to iPhoto, I don't allow it to copy them to iPhoto library. These days I have an iPhoto Library with over 100 GB of photos but the iPhoto Library is less than 5 GB. A 20 to 1 ratio for all that faces, events and places metadata is not too shabby and I never have to think about losing the whole thing again.

Now on to mail.app. I upgraded my Mac and I did the following. I made a fresh Time Machine backup to a firewire drive. I then popped in a new hard drive, installed Snow Leopard and did migration from the fresh backup I had just made. Everything came back. Everything but mail.app. It wouldn't launch. I had to delete its 10 GB library file and all it's plist files and set my mail up all over again. No biggie as my mail lives on gmail and mobile me's servers anyway but what if my only copy had been in mail.app? Perish the thought.

I suggest you install Thunderbird and import all your mail to Thunderbird. You can then export it in a variety of formats, including unix mbox format which almost any email client can import. Now that you have it backed up, go ahead and try moving your stuff to your new machine.

Mail and iPhoto are the only two apps where I've had problems but I would be cautious about every app. Since you've got two machines and plenty of time (you aren't rushing this are you? ), with patience you should be able to wind up with everything you need safely on your new machine.

Thanks for the thorough reply.

I experienced data loss in the past so I too am over cautious. Both computers (MBP and iMac) are backed up to a 2TB external RAID drive connected via firewire.

On the firewire drive I have the iPhoto library file (single file) saved as well as an exported (individual files) on there. As added security I have the actual sd memory card ISOs saved (flashdrop app) just in case.

As far as the mail app goes I don't have any of it saved. I have been trying to migrate to gmail but I do like having a physical copy of the emails offline. When I used Office in Windows I was able to export the mail data to a .pst file. I believe when I moved to OSX I installed thunderbird imported the .pst and then exported that to mbox (that sound right?). From there I imported it to mail and have been using that ever since. Mail doesn't have an export feature??

I don't want to backup from TM. None of the info on the MBP is critical. All of the important stuff is on the firewire drive or iMac and i want to import it after I am finished. If I backup from TM then I am going to get apps and other crap that I don't want on there.

 

[r0k]

Yes mail has an export feature but I haven't used it. It's under mailbox->export mailbox. It will probably make a unix style mbox but I don't know since I've never tried it. I would definitely back up the email since you don't have it anywhere else.

I learned a trick with google. I wanted to import years worth of old mail. I probably could have done it with mail.app but I wanted to keep mail.app "pristine" in case anything went wrong. What I did was import my old Eudora mailboxes into Thunderbird. No wait. I think I had to use Thunderbird because it was the only OS X app I could find that was capable of importing my old windows Eudora mailboxes. This was really helpful since I have no windows boxes around any more. Then I imported the mail to gmail using Thunderbird. Since it's IMAP, whatever I do locally shows up on gmail so now I have years of email all in one centrally searchable mailbox on gmail. More here...

But wait. There's more. When you imported it into mail.app, did you import it into a folder (label) that was part of your gmail account? If you did, it probably already got pushed up to gmail's server and you probably already have it backed up.

I would definitely consider getting away from the "single file" iPhoto Library. It's actually a folder which you can explore using "show package contents". The problem is that when it gets over a certain size, in my case it was 70 gig, iPhoto and iMovie become so slow as to become almost unusable. Now that I no longer copy files to iPhoto, the response is snappy even with metadata for over 100 gig of photos. I am still using an older version of iPhoto. When I heard that upgrading to the latest version of iLife could lead to loss of iPhoto data I was not amused and decided to sit this version out.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Yes mail has an export feature but I haven't used it. It's under mailbox->export mailbox. It will probably make a unix style mbox but I don't know since I've never tried it. I would definitely back up the email since you don't have it anywhere else.

I learned a trick with google. I wanted to import years worth of old mail. I probably could have done it with mail.app but I wanted to keep mail.app "pristine" in case anything went wrong. What I did was import my old Eudora mailboxes into Thunderbird. No wait. I think I had to use Thunderbird because it was the only OS X app I could find that was capable of importing my old windows Eudora mailboxes. This was really helpful since I have no windows boxes around any more. Then I imported the mail to gmail using Thunderbird. Since it's IMAP, whatever I do locally shows up on gmail so now I have years of email all in one centrally searchable mailbox on gmail. More here...

But wait. There's more. When you imported it into mail.app, did you import it into a folder (label) that was part of your gmail account? If you did, it probably already got pushed up to gmail's server and you probably already have it backed up.

I would definitely consider getting away from the "single file" iPhoto Library. It's actually a folder which you can explore using "show package contents". The problem is that when it gets over a certain size, in my case it was 70 gig, iPhoto and iMovie become so slow as to become almost unusable. Now that I no longer copy files to iPhoto, the response is snappy even with metadata for over 100 gig of photos. I am still using an older version of iPhoto. When I heard that upgrading to the latest version of iLife could lead to loss of iPhoto data I was not amused and decided to sit this version out.

Cool. I just exported all the folders using that method and yes it created a bunch of mboxes.

I have everything backed up on my iMac so its not really a big deal if I lose everything on the MBP - it would just be a pain to import it all again.

As for gmail, I never got around to importing everything from my pop accounts. Gmail is funny with creating folders (use labels instead) and I never got full accustomed to using it. Maybe one day I'll ditch the pop accounts and just go all out gmail but I don't see it happening.

I knew you could do that in iPhoto (show package contents) which would show you the individual files. So what do you do with the photos? Keep them in a folder somewhere and have iPhoto look for them there? I used to have something like that on windows but its been a long time since I used a PC.

 

[r0k]

I keep the photos organized by date on an external firewire drive. I also have them backed up on a NAS drive. I am looking for another level of backup like copying the whole thing to a USB drive once a month and putting it in a safe place. Of course once I've imported them into iPhoto, I refrain from moving them around so iPhoto can find them.

I love the way labels work in gmail. The rest of the world thinks its folders but in gmail it's all searchable as one big inbox.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

I'm assuming you've "Repaired Disk Permissions"?

 

[TangoJuliet]

ok, I got everything backed up. mail, photos, music, etc

how do I go about doing a clean install?

 

[Patranus]

ok, I got everything backed up. mail, photos, music, etc

how do I go about doing a clean install?

You have to format a flast drive as HFS+ with GUI partition table then "restore" the 10.7 image inside of the 10.7 app (show package contents->resources) in disk utility.

Work on all my pre 10.7 macs. cannot get my 10.7 MBP to boot off USB. Will try on a DVD when i find a black one.

 

[TangoJuliet]

I think I'm going to try something different. Instead of wiping the disk I think I'm going to buy a new larger drive. I did a quick look and there's a 500GB Seagate drive on newegg for around $45. I'd love to put a SSD in there but I don't have $400 laying around.

How do I put lion on a blank drive? Can I do the safari Internet option or is that for the new MBs only?

 

[TangoJuliet]

Can anybody recommend a good replacement drive? I've heard mixed things on the hybrid drives

 

[r0k]

Can anybody recommend a good replacement drive? I've heard mixed things on the hybrid drives

I have a Seagate Momentus XT. While not as fast as an SSD, it is a LOT faster than the 5400 RPM drive that came with my early 2008 Macbook. My boot times are SSD-like and my app launch times vary depending on how recently I used a particular app. The model I have is 500GB 7200 RPM with 4GB SSD and 32 MB (I think) cache. I paid about $130 for mine but there were better deals available by mail order.

I'm very happy with it when I consider that a 250ish GB SSD would cost $400 or more.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Thanks for the reply r0k. I think I am going to get the XT.

I have a mid 2010 MBP with 4GB RAM. I think I'll upgrade it and do a clean install from there. Once I got it setup then I'll format the old drive.

Now, how do I put lion on a blank drive?

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Thanks for the reply r0k. I think I am going to get the XT.

I have a mid 2010 MBP with 4GB RAM. I think I'll upgrade it and do a clean install from there. Once I got it setup then I'll format the old drive.

Now, how do I put lion on a blank drive?

You can easily find instruction online, but basically you take the disc image in the installer that you get through the App Store and then burn that onto a disc and then just use it like a regular OS install disc.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Bought the drive from newegg today. Burned the disc image to dvd. Just waiting for the new drive to arrive and then its re-install city.

 

[r0k]

Great! BTW, you could simply "restore" the image to an 8 gig USB stick. If you boot with the usb stick plugged in, it will show up as one of the devices you can boot. (It's slightly too big for a 4 gig USB stick).

I should mention (just in case) the steps I used to go from my old drive to my new drive:
Option 1 (before I knew any better):
I made a fresh new Time Machine backup to a firewire external drive.
I swapped in the new drive.
I booted the SL DVD and used Disk Utility to set up 1 partition HFS+ journaled GUID partition table.
I installed Snow Leopard then migrated from the TM backup I just made.
I then upgraded to Lion (Lion came out a few days after I did the switch).

Option 2 (when I got better at it)
I plugged in my new drive to usb using a USB to SATA cable and used disk utility to format it 1 partition HFS+, GUID partition table.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a somewhat exact copy of my internal drive to my new drive.
I booted from the new drive (still plugged in to USB) to prove it was good.
I swapped the drives.
I upgraded to Lion.
Total time, at least 3x faster than option 1.

 

[TangoJuliet]

Great! BTW, you could simply "restore" the image to an 8 gig USB stick. If you boot with the usb stick plugged in, it will show up as one of the devices you can boot. (It's slightly too big for a 4 gig USB stick).

I should mention (just in case) the steps I used to go from my old drive to my new drive:
Option 1 (before I knew any better):
I made a fresh new Time Machine backup to a firewire external drive.
I swapped in the new drive.
I booted the SL DVD and used Disk Utility to set up 1 partition HFS+ journaled GUID partition table.
I installed Snow Leopard then migrated from the TM backup I just made.
I then upgraded to Lion (Lion came out a few days after I did the switch).

Option 2 (when I got better at it)
I plugged in my new drive to usb using a USB to SATA cable and used disk utility to format it 1 partition HFS+, GUID partition table.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a somewhat exact copy of my internal drive to my new drive.
I booted from the new drive (still plugged in to USB) to prove it was good.
I swapped the drives.
I upgraded to Lion.
Total time, at least 3x faster than option 1.

Thanks for the advice but I'm not going to restore from a backup. I have a bunch of apps and things that I don't want on the clean install. Software like fusion I don't want on the new drive because I don't use windows any more. I've probably booted into it 2 times since I bought the MBP. I think one of those times was just to show it off to a co-worker.

I got all my data backed up on a FW800 drive. After I install the new drive and install Lion I'm just going to put the data back on and configure the rest of the machine. Once I feel comfortable with the install I'll format the old one.

Is there anything special I have to do with the new hybrid drive? It has 4GB of SSD memory on it so do I install the OS on that "partition" and then have all the data on the rest? I been out of the PC game for a little while so this is kind of new to me.

 

[r0k]

Thanks for the advice but I'm not going to restore from a backup. I have a bunch of apps and things that I don't want on the clean install. Software like fusion I don't want on the new drive because I don't use windows any more. I've probably booted into it 2 times since I bought the MBP. I think one of those times was just to show it off to a co-worker.

I got all my data backed up on a FW800 drive. After I install the new drive and install Lion I'm just going to put the data back on and configure the rest of the machine. Once I feel comfortable with the install I'll format the old one.

Is there anything special I have to do with the new hybrid drive? It has 4GB of SSD memory on it so do I install the OS on that "partition" and then have all the data on the rest? I been out of the PC game for a little while so this is kind of new to me.

You simply follow the steps I outlined earlier and ignore the 4GB SSD. The firmware of the drive handles what gets in the 4GB SSD. It's similar to a cache. Data is always written to the HDD. Data which is read frequently gets "prefetched" to the SSD. I don't think you could "find" the 4GB SSD even if you tried. It all looks like 500 GB of HDD space and all the SSD vs rotating HDD logic goes on behind the scenes. There is a detailed review here at anandtech and another one over at tomshardware.

I run windows 8 inside virtualbox just to tinker and play (now that I've got HDD space to burn). There is nothing to install (other than virtualbox) as all my virtual drives are simply image files and I can create and delete them at will.

 

[TangoJuliet]

holy crap this thing is FAST! got the drive in 2 days from the egg and installed it today.

I'm not noticing any increased noise from the drive. I really think this thing just needed a fresh clean. I went from Leopard > Snow Leopard > Lion without a clean

 

[Rottie]

SSD is very tempting but I hate to spend a lot of money...Not sure about 128 or 256GB is enough for OSX, apps, and data install. or better buy Seagate Momentous XT 500GB?

 

[TangoJuliet]

SSD is very tempting but I hate to spend a lot of money...Not sure about 128 or 256GB is enough for OSX, apps, and data install. or better buy Seagate Momentous XT 500GB?

I felt the same way. If I was going to drop $400 on a SSD I'd rather just buy a MBA. I think this XT was a nice upgrade. System is super fast and snappy as opposed to the stock drive. It could also be that my system was in need of a cleaning too.

 

[Emulex]

SSD in any macbook makes it come to life. do it