Mac OS X 4.11 All my Preferences Disappeared?? Mail, Firefox, System Prefs etc..

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Hi there,

I own a great 7 year-old MacBook Pro, still running OS X 4.11. Before you laugh at me for not upgrading it has worked like a dream and never felt the need to upgrade though am sure I'm missing some good things by not doing so.

Anyhow the other day, down to about my last 6 GB on my internal hard drive (87GB used of 93GB), my Mac Mail started misbehaving and asked me to restart.

On restart, my whole desktop, icons/thumbnails etc were all jumbled beyond recognition, sidebar was almost empty, Mac Mail when opened asked me to start from the beginning (i.e.set up an email account etc etc). I did this, because I could remember the settings for my addresses. Then Mail asked me to import my old mailboxes, which it did - but everything looks different, fonts, no signatures (they'd taken ages to organise) and no inbox or sent meail folders.

Ditto Firefox and Safari - when opened, all bookmarks have disappeared, and all autocomplete passwords for sites have gone.

It's clear my system is pretty messed up. Luckily, I have a bootable Carbon Copy Cloned external drive of how my Mac used to be 6 weeks ago. When I used this to boot, everything above was back to normal.

My questions are:

1) Is there any way to get back to where my system was before the blowout using my Cloned Drive? I.E. Can I simply erase the contents of the internal drive and 'paste' over it with the Cloned Drive? Is this risky?

or

2) Is there a less invasive way - is it easy to reintroduce the old preferences from the Cloned drive?

finally

3) Do I need a new hard drive?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!



Adrian

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Model Name: MacBook Pro 17"
Model Identifier: MacBookPro2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP21.00A5.B08
MacBook Pro 17", Mac OS X (10.4.11), Intel Core 2 Duo
 

bobtomay

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You would do it exactly the same way you created the clone except in reverse.

Boot to the clone, format the internal drive and then clone itself back to the internal drive.

I would strongly encourage you upgrade to a larger drive though - 5% free space is not enough to keep your system functioning in a good manner.
 
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You would do it exactly the same way you created the clone except in reverse.

Boot to the clone, format the internal drive and then clone itself back to the internal drive.

I would strongly encourage you upgrade to a larger drive though - 5% free space is not enough to keep your system functioning in a good manner.

Bob thanks a lot for the quick reply.

It sounds like sound advice - though might there be an issue with the 'new' drive (that's been overwritten once I clone the backup drive back over the original internal drive) not being able to read registry files since it will 'think' they are on the cloned external drive?

And secondly - if I buy a new hard drive with my old 2007 MacBook Pro, might there not be compatibility issues because the rest of the hardware is so much older?

I bought Snow Leopard a few months back so it would be a good time to do the whole system, though am a bit worried it's too much for the old girl..

Thoughts?

Thanks again,


Adrian
 

chscag

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Bob thanks a lot for the quick reply.

It sounds like sound advice - though might there be an issue with the 'new' drive (that's been overwritten once I clone the backup drive back over the original internal drive) not being able to read registry files since it will 'think' they are on the cloned external drive?

And secondly - if I buy a new hard drive with my old 2007 MacBook Pro, might there not be compatibility issues because the rest of the hardware is so much older?

I bought Snow Leopard a few months back so it would be a good time to do the whole system, though am a bit worried it's too much for the old girl.. Adrian

What you've experienced are the results of "putting off" upgrading your version of OS X and moving on to a larger hard drive. With that said....

Copying the cloned backup drive over the internal drive should work without any adverse effects. And since there are no "registry" files or registry in OS X, you can put that aside.

And yes, now is a good time to buy a larger faster hard drive and install Snow Leopard. There should be no compatibility issues with doing that. Whether or not your 2007 MBP will live on after the upgrades - who knows? It's already an old machine. Maybe time to invest in a newer one?
 
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chscag,

Great advice and much appreciated.

Clearly it's time to upgrade at the least, or maybe invest in a new Mac.

A question regarding Snow Leopard: if I bought a new drive, installed Snow Leopard, then used my cloned drive for all my old apps and settings etc - would my preferences appear as they used to in Mail, Firefox etc? Bookmarks, Keychains, passwords for sites etc?

Or would a new HD + new Snow Leopard OS install mean starting again...my Mac Mail alone would take days to reconfigure, with all the prefs I have going on there with signatures etc.

Thanks again.
 

chscag

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I can't really be sure what the result will be when upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard. When I upgraded my older 2008 MacBook from Leopard to Snow Leopard it kept all my apps and settings intact including keychains. Only those apps (there were several) that were no longer compatible with Snow Leopard would not run or were removed.

I can tell you though that several of your apps will surely have to be updated when going from Tiger to Snow Leopard. Mail, iLife, and a few others are likely going to ask for updates or may not run with Snow Leopard. So I would say be prepared for some work getting everything updated. Just be sure to make backups before upgrading. You won't have access to Time Machine from Tiger but you do have Carbon Copy Cloner.

Also keep in mind that if you should go with a new machine it will have Mountain Lion pre-installed. That means none of your older PPC coded apps will run. Apps such as Office 2004 and iWork 08 will not run in Mountain Lion. Lion and Mountain Lion will only run apps that are coded for the Intel platform.
 

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