Migration assistant, and doing a 'clean' install

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Hi,
I have several quesitons about upgrading OS, clean installs and migration assistant.

Firstly, I have been slowly having issues with my late 2008 MBP recently, trouble ejecting external disks, Finder freezing, then on relaunch, not coming back, forcing a restart. Restart often hangs, and I need to force shut down by pressing the power key one or two times to reboot. Also some total crashes, sometimes as often as 1 a day. This was all under Lion.
I bought Drive Genius, had a poke around, did some repairs on my Internal Harddrive, then decided to upgrade to ML, do a clean install, and see what happened.

Before upgrading, I wiped my internal harddrive and re formatted it, then upgraded to ML, before using Migration Assistant to bring my old account back over.

As a side note, in the past, i did a full clean instal in the past, where I created a new account and manually added everything back, but this caused a massive headache as my new account no longer had access privileges to my Time Machine backup.

Since my upgrade I have run Drive Genius again, and the drive seems ok, but it is still quite heavily fragmented. I am assuming that is due to migration assistant pulling back my files as they were originally, which must have been fragmented too.

Despite my upgrade to ML, i still have crashes, finder still causes issues, and I still have some trouble ejecting discs, (The icon stays greyed out on the desktop after the disc is gone).

My questions.
1. Is it possible to migrate just my basic account back to a new install WITHOUT all my apps and files, so I can bring them over manually later, and perhaps avoid all that fragmentation?

2. Does it sound like maybe something is wrong with my account and I should start over, with a new admin account. Is it possible to do that without all the permissions issues i had the last time eg, make sure I have the same account name? (I seem to rememeber reading that accounts have unique digit id, that causes the permissions issues if you change accounts and try to use old TM back ups).

3. Does it sound like perhaps a hard ware issue, considering the upgrade didn't solve much?
(I haven't run Hardware test yet, but will tonight)

4. Regarding the fragmentation, I guess some of you will say it's not an issue in OS X. In any case, i've tried to defragment my IHD since the upgrade, but it fails each time, even though I have over 100gb of space on that drive. Any ideas about that?

I know this is long, but I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I've already spent quite a bit of time on this, and want to get it sorted and get on with my work. I'm considering going back to Lion for now, and working it out from there.

Thanks in advance for any help guys and galls.

Sim
 
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Firstly, I have been slowly having issues with my late 2008 MBP recently, trouble ejecting external disks, Finder freezing, then on relaunch, not coming back, forcing a restart. Restart often hangs, and I need to force shut down by pressing the power key one or two times to reboot. Also some total crashes, sometimes as often as 1 a day. This was all under Lion.
I bought Drive Genius, had a poke around, did some repairs on my Internal Harddrive, then decided to upgrade to ML, do a clean install, and see what happened.

I'm not sure what you mean when you "had a poke around". Did you run Drive Genius' "Scan" module to screen for bad blocks? If not, you should do so. It sounds like your drive is dying. Also see my tips on checking for drive health here:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...o-much-space-used-hard-drive.html#post1372971
 
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Simbad54
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Thanks for the advice. I thought I'd run the disk scan, but it appears I didn't. So far turned up 1 bad block at 20% scanned. I'll see what's up when it's done.

Also forgot to mention as per your sig, I have Cleanmymac installed, as well as Cleanmydrive. I've disabled the latter as it seemed to cause issues with ejecting external HD's.
I did install a demo of MacKeeper a while ago, but got rid of it again.
I also run onyx now and then.
 
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Simbad54
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Ok, I ran the basic scan, which took about 2 hours and it found one bad block. That doesn't sound to bad, but I don't know about blocks. Any ideas?
Should I run the extended scan?
 
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Thanks for the advice. I thought I'd run the disk scan, but it appears I didn't. So far turned up 1 bad block at 20% scanned. I'll see what's up when it's done.

Also forgot to mention as per your sig, I have Cleanmymac installed, as well as Cleanmydrive. I've disabled the latter as it seemed to cause issues with ejecting external HD's.
I did install a demo of MacKeeper a while ago, but got rid of it again.
I also run onyx now and then.

Ok, I ran the basic scan, which took about 2 hours and it found one bad block. That doesn't sound to bad, but I don't know about blocks. Any ideas?
Should I run the extended scan?

Yes, definitely run the extended scan. That will be pretty much definitive, though feel free to look over this post of mine with tips on testing drive health. When all is said and done, if all it finds is the one bad block, then I'd say the drive is fine.

I do need to comment on CleanMyMac. Don't use it. I've tested it in the past and quite frankly I think it's little more than FUDware. It does nothing that can be done for less or for free with better software. It's module to "clean system junk" doesn't actually appear to do anything. I ran it on a brand new folder to which I had copied a handful of PNG images. CMM claimed it saved me some amount of disk space, but nothing actually changed. Not even the invisible files, which I had made visible.

If you feel the need to use a cleaning tool, Onyx is very competent. Literally the only other one I would recommend is TinkerTool System. It's not free, but is cheap and has a handful of tricks up its sleeve that Onyx can't do. It also does a much better job of explaining what each module does. I don't care much for the UI though. In any event, it's not necessary to run any of these tools on a regular basis. Certainly as part of troubleshooting, but generally speaking OS X does a fine job on its own.
 
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Simbad54
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Thanks for all the adive there man. I'll look into the extended scan once I have some time to do it. I think, anyway, i'm going to go back to Lion for now and take it from there. I may well get a new hard drive anyway, they're so cheap now.

On a side note, do you have any thoughts about my other question about migration assistant? Can I do a clean install, then migrate my basic account info, but NOT my data, and then bring the data and apps over manually later on?
 
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Thanks for all the adive there man. I'll look into the extended scan once I have some time to do it. I think, anyway, i'm going to go back to Lion for now and take it from there. I may well get a new hard drive anyway, they're so cheap now.

On a side note, do you have any thoughts about my other question about migration assistant? Can I do a clean install, then migrate my basic account info, but NOT my data, and then bring the data and apps over manually later on?

You can pick and choose what you want the Migration Assistant to bring over. If you are rolling back to a prior version of OS X, I'm not sure that you can migrate a user account from a newer version.
 
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Simbad54
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Thanks. I started the extended scan, and it's looking at 4 to 5 days! Not sure about that. I've cleaned up the one damaged block, am defraging my HD from Genius, and gong to see then.

Probably I will roll back to Lion and if it comes to it, I may start from scratch again, with a new user account, if I can't bring it over in bits.

Again, thanks for all the advice and tips. I'll look into your hints on drive health as well.
 
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Simbad54
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Ok, so, things seem to be looking a bit cleared. I've defragged my hd and it's running a lot smoother.
How ever, I went ahead and checked out SMART Utility and I got a warning that the drive was failing.
It claims I have 98 errors and the last one was uncorrectable.
Overall SMART Status: FAILING.

Does this mean I need a new hard drive?
 
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Ok, so, things seem to be looking a bit cleared. I've defragged my hd and it's running a lot smoother.
How ever, I went ahead and checked out SMART Utility and I got a warning that the drive was failing.
It claims I have 98 errors and the last one was uncorrectable.
Overall SMART Status: FAILING.

Does this mean I need a new hard drive?

SMART Utility isn't completely infallible, but everything I've read says it's highly accurate. The extended surface scan should be more definitive, but that would stress the drive more and you have all the signs of a failing drive anyway. This is just icing on the cake. I would replace it as soon as you have an opportunity to do so.
 
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Simbad54
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Thanks for the advice. I will do that.
Cheers for taking the time.

S
 

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