I think I'm going to reformat and reinstall Leopard

I've come across a lot of different problems. From iCal and Mark's Missing Sync crashing, to iChat, Adium, and Firefox all crashing at certain times that they didn't crash before upgrading to Leopoard. I think I may just reformat my hard drive and put a clean new install on it because I've already done the Archive and Install method and no change. My only problem is that I don't think that if I simply copied over all the files in my Applications folder it would go back on just as easily. I don't have a lot of the installation disks anymore, so I was hoping that I could restore them from a backup drive.

Another thought is about Time Machine. Would I be able to use it to bring all of my applications and settings back if I reformat the hard drive? Or would that bring back the same kinds of errors that I've already got?

Last thought, should I just bring my laptop into the Apple store and have them decide what would be best?

tmaclean said:

My only problem is that I don't think that if I simply copied over all the files in my Applications folder it would go back on just as easily. I don't have a lot of the installation disks anymore, so I was hoping that I could restore them from a backup drive.

Click to expand...

I've actually done just that, and there is a secret to it. You can copy them over, but then boot from the DVD and run disc utility and repair permissions.

Time machine is gr8 tool to restore your system to the last backup point. However a word of caution in your case would be that if there are any apps which are creating problems it will come back when you restore from time machine... so make sure you bring it to a state where your system is in good health and then take last backup before format.

Well there hasn't really been a time since installing Leopard that my system has been completely stable. That's why I wanted to reformat and reinstall. A friend of mine suggested to try Applejack to fix the problem, but when I boot into single-user mode and I type "applejack" it says that I'm not authorized as the root user even though the prompt says "root."