chas_m, just read your essay and will take advantage of your willingness to answer dumb questions, or in this case help with problems created by sheer stupidity. Two years ago I upgraded to Snow Leopard (sic!) to run the new trackpad for iMacs. I put the boxes and SN disk on the "foot" of the iMac (i.e. about 18 inches from my nose just under the "apple" below the screen). Then I forgot about it and thus didn't file it with my other Apple software.
Much later when "verify disk" in disk utility started urging me to reinstall my operating system because the file count was out, I ignored it, but eventually the number of extra files grew and the message to reinstall got more urgent (coloured print). So I went to my Apple software file and pulled out the two disks that came with the machine in 2008 (see where this is going?!). And thus I reinstalled Leopard!
When I reimported all my stuff from Time Machine there was some confusion because part of my file material would have been created with changes introduced in later upgrades of Leopard and Snow Leopard (gradually upgraded to 10.6.8) and, I expect, the reimposed Leopard would have been surprised by some of this stuff "coming from the future". Especially since I was initially using 10.5.4.
(I didn't realize I had over-written SN with Leopard until after I wrote my first note on this thread when I finally looked down and discovered the boxes for the trackpad and SN sitting right under my nose. No wonder the trackpad won't work properly; it needs SN.)
But before I had this epiphany I redid the Leopard installation so that I could upgrade from 10.5.4 to 10.5.8 before I imported my files. I was advised to do a "Clean Install". "Switching to the Mac" also calls this "Archive and Install". That is how I ended up with a copy of the operating system somewhere called "Previous Operating Systems". Frankly everything (except the trackpad) runs pretty well, but my use of space on the hard drive has grown from about 28 GB to 125 GB.
I would like to get this hard drive space back. I have at least one unneeded operating system (thus my question, where is this folder called Previous Operating Systems?)
Secondly, dare I simply reinstall Snow Leopard, up-grade it to 10.6.8 (The disk is 10.6.3) and restore my stuff from Time Machine using a date before I got into this mess? Could it be that simple? By the way I have turned Time Machine off since I started this adventure so I have avoided copying all these troubles onto that hard drive. So once I get Snow Leopard installed I should be able just go back and restore all my old Snow Leopard created files from Time Machine. But I am getting gun shy and
would appreciate your opinion on this.
Even if it is that simple I expect I will still have a bunch of useless stuff clogging up my internal hard drive.
Thanks in advance from alt also in Victoria, BC.