[P1] How Often Does Jag need a reinstall?

[Michael Flournoy]

I was an early adopter of OSX and when Jaguar came out I took the 
opportunity to start over from a fresh slate. I did NOT have any 
problem with my old install but with Jag we came out of "beta" and I 
didn't want any hidden snakes to crawl out of the grass. When I erased 
the hard-drive I set up a small ( 900mb ) partition and installed the 
latest version of OS9 on it with all my normal extentions and favorite 
old programs. I then installed another copy of OS9 to the main 
partition for OSX to use on Classic.
By doing this I am not using up much space but I gain a safe boot in 
case of problems. Also Virtual PC works much better. My main reason for 
doing this though is for long trips away from power, OS9 has much 
better energy management and I pick up at least another hour of battery 
use under it.
I only recommend this if you are erasing the hard-drive anyway, I have 
gained a lot of comfort in OSX's stability over the last 2 years. It is 
amazing compared to Windows 95/98 and the older Mac OS.

                   Mike

On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 08:13 PM, Jack Rodgers wrote:

> On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 12:54  PM, Pat D. Stephens wrote:
>
>> I'm using my month old iBook just as it came to me without a 
>> partitioned drive, but am warned that it is dangerous to do that 
>> since X has reputedly required a reinstall frequently.
>
> There are two reasons I can think of when one might want to reinstall 
> ANY operating system preceeded by an erasure of the drive:
>
> 1) Things have become so screwed up that no amount of troubleshooting 
> seems to solve the problem.
>
> 2) You have downloaded tons of software of the net and tried it out 
> and your hard drive is approaching 2 free bytes.
>
> I have suffered with both. In fact I bought a new TiBook with a Jaguar 
> update disk and the update either didn't work right or when I copied 
> over my user stuff, something busted. I had weeks of problems until I 
> bit the bullet and did a wipe and a clean install.
>
> With OS X's 200,000 plus files (varies of course) it has become 
> impossible to find all of the files belonging to an unwanted shareware 
> application, etc., and remove them. Thus remains the nagging feeling 
> that your drive is really crappy and loaded with unwanted stuff. These 
> emotions eventually have an affect on your Mac and it suffers a 
> nervous breakdown. So, you either have to do the reinstall before this 
> happens or after it happens, your choice.  :)
>
> Partitioning a drive has its advocates and detractors. It's really 
> your choice since there doesn't seem to be any proven authority on the 
> subject that can explain why it would be bad. I don't think there are 
> any lab tests, etc, nor any studies that show that XX% more failures 
> are attributed to partitioning. Sometimes a partition breaks but so 
> does an unpartitioned drive. I've had failures under both conditions.
>
> Apple doesn't partition its drives but it does provide software that 
> will should you want to so in a way Apple is condoning partitioning.
>
> ---
> I noticed while listening to the Capital Gang on CNN rant on pro and 
> con about UM's 20 points for Blacks that not one of the CG on CNN is 
> Black.
> Jack Rodgers
>
> Email: jackrodgers at earthlink.net
> Web:  www.jackrodgers.com
> iCal:  coming soon
> iBlog: coming soon
>
>
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