11-09-2007, 07:14 PM

OK, so I bought my mbp at the beginning of october, got Leopard, installed it, now I've had a couple of problems which have escalated into more problems. I worked w/ apple tech support and am sick of the run-around(they were actually really helpful, it just didn't solve the problem) They had me do some weird random things I don't like. So now all I want to do is format the hard drive completely and re-install leopard. All that I need to save are my pictures, music, email, and microsoft office. I haven't had my mbp long enough to download too much stuff. What is the procedure of doing all of this?

I'm new to the mac thing. I owned an HP for years up until I bought this computer

Thanks
Kyle

11-09-2007, 07:50 PM

You could either burn what you can to disc's and reinstall the programs or do a archive and install.

11-09-2007, 08:14 PM

The good news is that it is simple, just burn a copy of your User folder. Everything you need to survive a reformat is in your User folder. The bad news is that since everything is in your User folder there maybe some sort of evil lurking within. Here's the deal: you reformat, you reinstall, everything is fine until you migrate your User folder back in and the problems start all over again.

Just for fun, make a new User, surf the net, post on mac-forums, see if the crashes continue. If so, burn your User folder, reformat, live long and prosper. If your problems magically disappear as a new User, there may be evil in your real User folder. Which of course is a whole lot more difficult to diagnose!

11-09-2007, 08:51 PM

ok so what exactly do I do to make this happen? What exactly do I need to burn to just save my e-mail, music, pictures and MS Office? That's really all that I need from this system. I doubt that anything nasty could be hidden in the basic things like that, but I could be wrong. So what do I do here? After I eventually burn everything do I just throw in the leopard CD and say FORMAT?

11-09-2007, 09:12 PM

Just that, your User folder. If it is called "morris0352" then burn it! All of your bookmarks, email, etc lives in that folder. Wait a minute, though, your MS Office lives in the root Applications folder. You will need to reinstall that, but no worries, your Word/Excel files are safely in your User folder.