Will reinstalling Snow Leopard overwrite applications?

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Yesterday my Mac Pro refused to start up.


On the grey screen a "question mark folder" flashed up for less than a second, then the apple logo and then it went to a blue screen and stayed there with the spinning circle going round and round...


I booted from the Snow Leopard install disk (I was on 10.6.8) and ran disk utility. Verified and repaired the disk and permissions. When I tried to reboot from the startup disk the same blue screen issue happened.


Have also booted in single user mode and done fsck, have reset the pram and smc but nothing seems to work.


I feel like the only option is to reinstall snow leopard from the disk but I have a lot of applications on my Mac and I am wondering if these will be wiped when I reinstall or will they be left untouched? I'd just rather not have the hassle of dealing with deauthorizing software licences etc... can't seem to find an answer online...


Also - any ideas of what has happened?


Any help much appreciated.


Many thanks,


David
 
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Definitely didn't leave it as long as an hour - will give that a go...
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini (Late 2014) 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 Memory: 8GB 1600MHz DDR3
Only a clean install will affect your applications. It is possible to just reinstall the OS and leave applications untouched.
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
That's correct. By default, Snow Leopard does an Archive and Install unless as noted you install clean.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Sounds like your hard drive may fail or has failed. Disk Utility does not do a great job diagnosing failing drives.
 

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