02-10-2012, 12:49 PM

Hey guys, im very confused! Yesterday i did a fresh install of lion from the recovery partition that it creates when you upgrade from SL. The reason i did a fresh install is because after using lion for a few months my mac got progressively slower and unresponsive. Anyway back to my question! so i did the fresh install, it boots into lion and everything is the same?! my desktop is still the same my account hasn't been deleted its all exactly how i left it! but to be fair it runs allot faster! so what happened guys?

02-10-2012, 01:36 PM

Originally Posted by stev1212

Hey guys, im very confused! Yesterday i did a fresh install of lion from the recovery partition that it creates when you upgrade from SL. The reason i did a fresh install is because after using lion for a few months my mac got progressively slower and unresponsive. Anyway back to my question! so i did the fresh install, it boots into lion and everything is the same?! my desktop is still the same my account hasn't been deleted its all exactly how i left it! but to be fair it runs allot faster! so what happened guys?

I and a number of other regulars have decided to do a clean install of Lion and found that it does indeed seem to clear out a few quirks. I manually migrated my user accounts over to minimize what the Migration Assistant would have done. In your case… you didn't do a clean install. Not if your user accounts are still there and you didn't migrate them back over from a backup.

So why is it faster? *shrug* Could be any number of things. Problems with the cache that could have been solved without a reinstall perhaps. No telling.

02-10-2012, 01:46 PM

How on earth do i do a fresh install then? :s i clicked 'Reinstall lion' it took about an hour to download the OS and about 20 mins to install it. Restarted and booted like a new computer again but then BAM my login appears and my desktop and all my files remain! My spotlight re-indexed aswell but that bugged out and i had to use a terminal command to get it to re-index (again) today. And now it finds files faster than i can type! (not that thats a bad thing )

02-10-2012, 01:58 PM

A fresh install requires the erasing of your Lion partition using the recovery partition Disk Utility. Then, downloading and reinstalling Lion. Obviously, you want to make sure you have a Time Machine backup before doing so.

02-10-2012, 02:09 PM

I see, so basically what i did was reinstall the core OS but kept everything that resides on-top of the OS (if you understand what i mean)

02-10-2012, 02:37 PM

Yep. You did what's called an "Archive and reinstall" which preserves all data, applications, and account information. It then overwrites and replaces system files and kexts. Ever since the release of Snow Leopard, that has been the default reinstall unless you choose to erase the drive first.

02-10-2012, 02:48 PM

Thank you for the help guys! Great community you have here

02-10-2012, 03:21 PM

If you go into the App Store, hold down Option and hit Purchases and then the Lion icon you will be able to do another download f.o.c. This time before installing, make a USB thumb drive which will be bootable.


http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-...b-flash-drive/