Starting Over Again, A few Q's

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Aug 11, 2005
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Alright, I have had my Mac for about a year now and have filled up every nook and cranny of its hard drive and it has begun to kind of lag a lot. I want to backup a lot of things and then reformat the hardrive. I have a few questions before I go about doing this:

1. I backup my iTunes library on an external hardrive a lot, but its a manual backup, I dont use an application that compresses it to one file, I just copy the iTunes library folder to another drive. Everytime I delete an artist from my library, I delete it permanently, knowing that I still have them saved on the external drive. So if I deleted a folder called AC/DC from my regular itunes folder, when I copy my iTunes folder to the backup, it asks me if I want to replace the folder called iTunes, Will it delete the folder called ac/dc already in the backup, since it isnt in the folder I am copying over.


2. How do I reformat my drive?

3. How do I reinstall tiger, when I bought my mac it came with 10.3 but then tiger came out the day after and I got it for 9.99 and had to install it after I started using my mac, I think its an upgrade version, does that matter? Do I install 10.3 and upgrade it again to tiger?

4. Am I stupid for doing this?

-Thanks
 
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Your Mac's Specs
iMac 17" Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz 512 MB Ram 128 vRAM 60GB HD
1: I have no clue what you're talking about
2: I'm hitting a memory block here what does reformat mean?
3: No. Just pop in the tiger disc, wipe it clean with the disk utility, and reinstall Tiger.
4: No, this is the point of Switchover Hangout.
 
Joined
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Your Mac's Specs
i dont have no mac's
what exactly do you have on your disk? is it full of mp3's, video files, movies??? instead of backing up on your hard disk maybe you would want to just store everything on it (if you need another drive i am selling one if you wanna search my name in the buy/sell/trade forum.)

having a maxed out hard drive is almost as bad as putting it in a fireplace. it needs to reshuffle its contents and gets so much wear and tear that it shortens the life of the drive. so whatever your going to do do it in the next few weeks and not next year.

how big is your hard disk and what kind of mac do you have? maybe it is time for an upgrade to a larger internal drive. anyway, back to your questions

1) yea i dont know what you are talking about either
2) insert your osx disk, restart, hold down c and it will boot to the disk and ask you installation questions, you can reformat and install from there, or archive and install(backs up all your stuff and puts a fresh install of the os on your drive)
3)no, just use your most current disk and do what i said above
4)yes!!!!! im just kidding. you are in the switcher hangout, ask away and we will answer within a short while. lots of people who know their stuff on this board.

good luck
-chris
 
T

Tiranis

Guest
Ok, most of the questions were answered, now regarding the first one: yes, OS X will overwrite the folder completely, deleting all the previous stuff stored in it. It does just what it says, it replaces.
 

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