Does a clean install of lion help with problems?

Anybody who has had the litany of problems associated with lion tried an absolute clean install to see if that helps?

But It would be nice if just safari, mail, and the finder would work without giving me the spinning wheel at this time.
How much RAM do you have? Also, open Activity Monitor, click the System Memory tab and look at your page ins and page outs. If page outs is more than 1/10 of the page ins, you need more RAM. I myself was having some beach balls when doing certain demanding things (playing games, using Aperture, etc), and noticed that these values were darn close to equal. So I upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB of RAM and all is now good, no matter what I'm doing.
My timemachine backups failed a few days ago, I lost my copy of a working SL backup at that time, so much for diligence.
Yeah, one backup is not nearly enough. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who didn't realize their backups were on their way out until the moment they actually needed them, and then it's too late. Keep one Time Machine backup in the future, and at least one other backup with something like Carbon Copy Cloner.
I do think that it is important to know if others have had success with clean installs because I need to know if it is worth my while. Did you do a clean install?
But what I'm telling you is that it doesn't matter what others say. Unless you know that the cause of their problems is exactly the same as the cause of your problems, what they say is irrelevant. There are plenty of people here who have been helped by clean installs, but if all you need is more RAM, a clean install will be a waste of your time.
I did not do a clean install, I just installed Lion right on top of Snow Leopard. And except for my memory issues, which were overall nonexistent except when (and after) running certain apps, it's been a pretty smooth transition. But again, that has no bearing on your situation, except to tell you there's nothing inherently problematic about an upgrade install.

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Would a clean install of Lion Help

Sorry if this has been covered before. This is my situation: Snow Leopard was stable and a really great experience from moving away from windows, but in Oct I upgraded to Lion. Since then all I've had is problem after problem. Safari is a nightmares, hanging a lot, my printer only work if I plug it in via USB, the spinny ball is a daily friend, and my mac hangs far too often. Though my swearing has improved greatly. I would go as far as to say Windows XP is far less stressful then Lion. I would really like this to end as my opinion of Apple is not good. I know I'm not along on this issue so would a clean install of Lion help or would an clean install of Snow Leapard be better? Rant over...

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a test, not a solution. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
Step 1
The purpose of this step is to determine whether the problem is localized to your user account.
Enable guest logins and log in as Guest. For instructions, launch the System Preferences application, select Help from the menu bar, and enter “Set up a guest account” (without the quotes) in the search box.
While logged in as Guest, you won’t have access to any of your personal files or settings. Applications will behave as if you were running them for the first time. Don’t be alarmed by this; it’s normal. If you need any passwords or other personal data in order to complete the test, memorize, print, or write them down before you begin.
Test while logged in as Guest. Same problem(s)?
After testing, log out of the guest account and, in your own account, disable it if you wish. Any files you created in the guest account will be deleted automatically when you log out of it.
Note: If you’ve activated FileVault in Mac OS X 10.7 or later, then you can’t enable the Guest account. Create a new account in which to test, and delete it, including its home folder, after testing.
Step 2
The purpose of this step is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party system modifications that load automatically at startup or login.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. Boot in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including wireless networking on certain Macs.
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem(s)?
After testing, reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode.) Post the results of steps 1 and 2.

Will doing a clean install of Lion fix hangs?

Since upgrading to Lion I have had my share of crashes with mail especially and since doing the update to 10.7.1 my Macbook Pro is locking up with white screens, won't wake from sleep and crashing all over the place. Oh yea and Safari is hanging too.
I have used Lion Cache Cleaner to run maintenence scripts and it helped slightly so I was wondering if a clean install will help or if I just need to downgrade to Snow Leopard until they get the bugs worked out.
****, I feel like I am back on a PC again

Just because someone says they had success does not mean you will, and just because someone says that a clean install of Lion didn't do the trick for them doesn't mean it won't for you. You don't know what they did or didn't do and how their situation was different from yours.
There are no guarantees without knowing what's going on. I can tell you that what you're experiencing is not normal. I cannot, based on what you shared, tell you what's causing your problems. What's important for you to understand is that, for a variety of technical reasons, a system that was not having any problems before can fail dramatically following a major upgrade, but due to no fault of the upgrade's. You could have a hardware issue that Snow Leopard just never tripped on. You could have some corrupt system files that will be fixed by a reinstall. You could have bad third-party software that is horribly incompatible with Lion. There are just too many variables.
Ultimately it's certainly your right to choose to downgrade to Snow Leopard. However, sooner or later you're going to have to either deal with Lion or switch to Windows or Linux. I'd strongly advise trying to get your system to work with Lion, since it's working quite well for many people.

Tried doing a clean install of lion and now have a folder with question mark appearing when mac boots

I purchased a 2011 mac mini I was having some issues and as I had already bought lion for one of my other macs and put it on a usb key I formatted the mac mini's hdd and put the usb key in to one of the Mini's usb ports and booted the mini up and held down c when the white scren appeard it stayed white for a few secnds and then a folder with a question mark started flashing no option to select my connected usb key I tried several more re boots and each time got the exact same result.
What on earth has apple done so now I can't even access attached drives during booting.
Any ideas how I can sort this out?

Maybe it is not "what has Apple done" You may have jumped the gun a little formatting your system so quickly without ensuring you can actually boot via an alternate method.
The mini has a recovery partition, and instructions how to reinstall the OS from that.
USB drive. Sounds to me like you don't have a proper OSX Bootable USB drive?
Also, the new way Apple allows reinstallation is over the internet too.

A VERY Easy Tutorial on doing a clean install of Arch Linux with Gnome

is there anyone who could help me test Arch Linux with Gnome DE?

The pacman bit is new, and has already been solved: [SOLVED] pacman update fails: gcc requires gcc-libs=4.7.0-3
Just press "N" and you'll see that pacman will be on the list.
Welcome to the forums.
Edit:
Shahe1993 wrote:is there anyone who cou...
Oh. Feeling a bit busy there, huh? Nevermind.
Last edited by DSpider (2012-04-12 17:28:18)

Could someone help me with instructions for doing a clean install for iMac with mountain lion 10.8.4 ?

   Could someone help me with instructions for doing a clean install for Could someone help me with instructions for doing a clean install for an early 2009 iMac 20" with Mountain Lion 10.8.4 ?
   Thank You,
                            leetruitt

   Barney, William, nbar, Galt\'s Gulch:
   A nephew stayed with us to take a course at the local community college last semester. I allowed him use of my mac for research just after I installed Mountain Lion. He decided to "help out" and ran a 3rd party clean and tune up app., Magician. The tune up wiped over 1200 titles of my music in iTunes, also a path of folders with names containing nothing but more empty folders with names. Almost every program I open and run for a short time crashes, also folders and programs are in wrong places, or cannot be located (the nephew, for instance). Up to this time I have always been able to track a problem far enough to resolve it by careful persistence and good luck, but I do not have the tech savvy to solve this one without getting in deeper. I have run disk utility saveral times and always get variations of this:
ACL found but not expected on
"private/etc/resolve.conf"
"private/etc/raddb/sites-enabled/inner-tunnel"
"private/etc/rabbd/sites-enabled/control-socket"
     Also, after four years of intense daily use it is cluttered with much junk, and every app that I was curious about, and I am a very curious guy.
   So I know my limits, (and now my nephew). I dumped my pc for a Strawberry iMac a few years ago, and so far every problem I've encountered, or brought on myself, the Mac has resolved with its own inner elegance - in spite of my novice bungels - and now I honestly feel ashamed, in addition to the need to apologize to a machine for allowing a peasant into the Royal Grounds - so I am calling the Wise Ones in for this one.
   Crazy, I know, but to me a Mac represents something far beyond the ordinary input ➛ process ➛ output title/function customarily assigned to a machine - I sense an odd kind of morality involved, one that I need to respect.
    So, these are my reasons for wanting to do a clean install, correctly.
        Thank you, Truitt

I have just made a clean instalation of Lion, with a bootable disk, and I planned to restore my files (music, photos, etc.), but Lion doesn't find my backup files. So, I'm about to loose all of my iTunes library, work docum The installation run perfectly,

I have just made a clean instalation of Lion, with a bootable disk, and I planned to restore my files (music, photos, etc.), The installation run perfectly, but Lion doesn't find my backup files. So, I'm about to loose all of my iTunes library, work documents (I'm a lawyer!!), my kid's photos.... How can I restore my files?? Help!!

Since you seem to be using a new disk for Lion, Time Machine will consider previous backups to be for a "different" computer. Try doing a control-click or click-and-hold on the Time Machine icon in the Dock, then choose "Browse Other Time Machine Disks". This should allow Time Machine to see the previous backups.
In the worst case you should be able to open those Time Machine backups and copy your documents from there to your home folder.
By the way, you've been misled by poor field labeling on this forum into typing a large part of your message into the field intended for the subject. In the future just type a short summary of your post into that field and type the whole message into the field below that.

Clean install of Lion with Final Cut Express

I use Final Cut Express and Aperture 3 as my main pro software.
Recently when I wiped my boot drive and reinstalled Snow Leopard I found I had to install Final Cut Express first before doing the software
combi update and then installing the rest of my software.
If I now do a clean install of Lion from a backup I have already made from the download last week, is this going to be possible to continue using
FCE4 rather than installing Snow Leopard first and then Lion on top off.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Matt

Yes, it should. I was successful with my Win7 Boot Camp partition. But as always, be sure to backup the Windows partition, with a cloning utility if posssible, just in case...

ITunes quits unexpectedly when authorizing computer. Recently did a clean install of Lion. Help!!

I recently did a clean install of Lion and ever since I can't sync my iPhone with iTunes. All my Apps keep getting deleted and it asks me to authorize the computer. When I try to authorize iTunes quits all the time when it tries to contact the Store. When I view my account information in the Store it says i have 'one' computer authorized meaning my computer is authorized already.
Help!!

According to "man webappctl", the available apps are listed as plists in /etc/apache2/webapps, where we see:
ls -1 /etc/apache2/webapps/
com.apple.webapp.ACSServer.plist
com.apple.webapp.auth.plist
com.apple.webapp.collab.plist
com.apple.webapp.devicemgr.plist
com.apple.webapp.mailman.plist
com.apple.webapp.passwordreset.plist
com.apple.webapp.php.plist
com.apple.webapp.podcastwikiui.plist
com.apple.webapp.webcal.plist
com.apple.webapp.webcalssl.plist
com.apple.webapp.webdavsharing.plist
com.apple.webapp.webmailserver.plist
com.example.mywebapp.plist
org.calendarserver.plist
Judging by the names, I'm presuming you'd want to add commands to start com.apple.webapp.devicemgr.plist and org.calendarserver.plist and potentially also
com.apple.webapp.webcal.plist and com.apple.webapp.webcalssl.plist.
AFAICT the start/stop state persists across reboots.

Is installing mountian lion the same as doing a clean install of an iOS

is installing mountain lion the same as doing a clean install of an ios?

Haven't a clue what an ios is, but reinstalling SL, Lion, or ML replaces all OS components and the basic Apple apps, such as TextEdit, Safari, Mail, and Terminal. What it doesn't do is touch any user data, settings, or other apps.

Boot Camp, VIsta with SP1 x64 clean installed. Please help!

I clean-installed Vista Ultimate 64bit with SP1 (SP1 comes with Vista, not a separate download) on the latest macbook. As expected Boot Camp Application doesn't work (it doesn't even install).
1.I want to use the function keys (F1, F2, etc) for brightness and volume, which installation program should I run from the Leopard disk? I don't think I can find this "driver" online.
2.How can I get bluetooth on my macbook working? Which installation program should I run from the Leopard disk?
3.iSight camera. Is there a driver for iSight camera in 64bit Vista?
I see there's a "x64" folder in Leopard disk, under folder "drivers". Should I install everything in this folder? I haven't tried yet.
Thanks for help!

Hi Bjorne,
how did you manage to do a clean-install of Windows Vista with SP1 from a slipstreamed media? If I start my Macbook with the Vista SP1 DVD while holding down the "C" key, I will only see the following message:
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:
I can't go on any further, because hitting any key won't work.
The problem seems to the EFI bootloader on the Vista SP1 DVD which is compiled for 64-bit EFI environments (U-EFI 2.0)! The EFI environment used in Apple computers is based on version 1.10 and runs in 32-bit mode. I've found this information on the rEFIt homepage http://refit.sourceforge.net/info/vista.html and I've also found the homepage http://www.jowie.com/post/2008/02/Select-CD-ROM-Boot-Type--prompt-while-trying-t o-boot-from-Vista-x64-DVD-burnt-from-iso-file.aspx from Jowie who has the same problems. He has found out how to make the Vista SP1 DVD booting on an Apple computer by modifying the DVD image which seems to kill the EFI bootloader...
How did you manage to boot from an unmodified Vista SP1 DVD image?
Greetings,
OllieW

Hi, After I installed Mac Lion, I have problem with the tamil font while typing in Neo Office. Especially with the letters "e-Ex: தெ" and "ai-Ex:தை". Please help me I know its not bug from Apple It shd be some problem in neo.

Hi, After I installed Mac Lion, I have problem with the tamil font while typing in Neo Office. Especially with the letters "e-Ex: தெ" and "ai-Ex:தை". Please help me I know its not bug from Apple It shd be some problem in neo.

Is your problem due to the keyboard or to NeoOffice Characters? You have to change probably the font. Not all fonts are supporting all Unicode sets. Which font you have in your NeoOffice set to write Tamil? Try with Arial Unicode MS for example.
Are the letter e-Ex and ai-Ex right in your posting? If they are right, how you inserted these letters in your posting? By copy and paste or by typing? If by typing, your question is related to NeoOffice. Probably you should reinstall or update NeoOffice? Or switch to OpenOffice?
marek

Clean install of Lion with a bootcamp partition

On my MacBook Pro Snow Leopard and via Bootcamp is Windows XP installed.
I wanna do a clean install of Lion, but can this been done without disturbing the XP-Installation?

Yes, it should. I was successful with my Win7 Boot Camp partition. But as always, be sure to backup the Windows partition, with a cloning utility if posssible, just in case...

Clean Install of Lion with FileVault

Hi,
I was planning to do a clean install of lion but wondered if I should switch off FileVault2 before I do anything then once the install is done re-enable it or doesnt it matter?
I have a SuperDuper clone with filevault.
Thanks
Gavin

Yes, it should. I was successful with my Win7 Boot Camp partition. But as always, be sure to backup the Windows partition, with a cloning utility if posssible, just in case...

IChat with clean install of Lion, video slow on Core2 Duo

After a clean install of Lion on a newer iMac things are MUCH faster than when I had installed it OVER Snow Leopard.
However, ichat video is about 1 second slower than the audio and frame rates (of my own video) are about 5 frames per second.
Full screen makes it worse.
Anyone have any ideas? I have not installed any files or apps (except Flash for safari).... this is a FRESH Lion install from the Apple USB Lion. Wiped drive prior to install.
Definitely frustrated with 10.7.... and I have it on 3 different Macs.... wishing I didn't.

OK, you're right. I wish Apple would get rid of the Applications Folder in the User Folder.
If you haven't read this yet:
How to use Migration assistant to transfer files from another Mac
I still believe you are relatively safe in not porting over trouble from your previous System.
What trouble are you having

Does a clean install of lion help with problems?

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