Wiping your mac clean but saving your Home folder Thursday, October 11, 2007

The problem:

Your OS is acting weird, or you've confirmed something's corrupted or damaged in the OS that can't be repaired (maybe Disk Utility verifies OK, but there are still anomalies like Dashboard widgets not appearing right or something that could point to a scarier problem). You still seem to be able to use your files and programs though. You'd like to reinstall the OS, but not have to reinstall all your programs and go through all the preferences setup etc. For me I think the cause of this was improper shutdowns because my battery was flakey. I know the hardrive hardware is fine, I've had it checked.

My Solution seems to have worked pretty well for me:

For simplicity, lets call my sick computer SICK and my healthy iMac HEALTHY.

I created a new user with the same short name (what you see in the Terminal prompt) on HEALTHY and logged in.

I booted SICK up in target mode on HEALTHY so that SICK mounted as a drive on HEALTHY

Then used rsyncx to sync SICK home to the HEALTHY's home (which remember, has the same short name)

I then synced my applications from SICK's from /Applications to HEALTHY's /Users/healthy/Applications/ folder (You may have to create an Applications folder in your home dir on HEALTHY (The reason I did it into the home's Applications is that I didn't want to mix up the applications from the existing user on HEALTHY.)

Once that was done, that user account on HEALTHY worked pretty much just like it did on SICK and since HEALTHY's OS was intact to start with, I saw no weirdness with the widgets (And in theory no other major problems).

On HEALTHY I had to log out and log back in again, then my doc even had all my apps in it and Eclipse started ok – but i did notice that FDT plugin for Eclipse wanted its serial # again. Still, overall probably rated a success since it seems most of my preferences and settings were retained.

So in theory (and I haven't actually tried this yet), if I do a fresh install on SICK and wipe it clean, i should have similar success syncing from HEALTHY's home back to SICK's home (and for good measure I'll give the new main user account have the same short name)

Later, to clean up HEALTHY I can just delete the user account I created

I know there are good cloning apps like Carbon Copy Cloner but i didn't want to clone my messed up OS, only my files/prefs.

If anyone has a better less time consuming solution, I'd love to hear it.

**UPDATE: It worked like a charm, I'm back up and though it wasn't a quick fix, it was no doubt faster than reinstalling everything and setting up all my prefs and paths etc again. Hurray!