Reinstalling osx over a linux install?

Hi,
I've got a mini with ReiserFS on it, running Debian. I want to reinstall osx over it, but the OSX install disk won't see the drive.
suggestions?
Thanks.
-- James

wow, I can't believe I didn't think to do that. Worked like a charm.
This is why I don't do 20 hour days any more. That should have been obvious
Thanks =)
-- James

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Reinstalling OSX over Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu a while ago, and for complicated reasons now wish to switch back to OSX. The problem is that I did not use rEFIt, and now am not sure how to reinstall OSX. When I insert the OSX Install Disk that came with my computer (Intel iMac) GRUB does not give me the option to boot to it, nor to a live Ubuntu USB.
Any ideas?

You have to Repartition the drive as one partition and format it in the amac format and set the Partition table to GUID.
You can't install OS X Over Ubuntu. You have to wipe the drive of all traces of Ubuntu first.

I have to reinstall OSX upon every restart

I have the oddest problem.
Two weeks ago I restarted my computer and got stuck on the grey apple startup screen. At first I thought my HD was the issue. All of the data was accessable, and no signs of an issue (disk utility confirmed) Even knowing that I transferred all of the data over to a new drive and reinstalled OSX (not a clean install). All booted fine. It even booted upon every software update that was required. No issues while working from that point on, untill I needed to reboot. When this happened, I was faced with the forever grey apple startup screen again. I repeated the process, all booted fine as explained above, but this time I scanned for any viruses (not expecting any). Disk utility confirmed all was good with the new drive, and also with the old. All runs perfectly while on. I am confident that this is not a HD issue (mechanical). Moments ago I had to reboot with fingers crossed. Machine has been running for days with no issue. I'm back to square one. Something seems to be messing with what is required to startup on the drive. I have lost no data during these events. Here's my issue. I know I could do a clean install, but I have so many applications, and audio plugins, that have been authorized over the years - tracking down 3 year old serial numbers, and reinstalling items I might have even forget I was using would be a task I can't bare to think of. Any help would be wonderul. Even if I had to do a clean install, would there be a way to save that data and transfer it over without having to go through the relicencing of all of those apps, etc.? Yikes, what is going on? Is this a "genuis bar" canadate?
Thanks in advance for your wisdom.
L
Mac Pro 12 Core, Mac OSX 10.6.8

When you reinstall just OS X, it overwrites itself and those bundled Apple programs with a new (but older) copy then you Software update to get current on 10.6.8
Some third party software you install installs a at boot kernel extension file that gets loaded when OS X loads, if there is a problem with that software it causes the gray screen and spinning wheel thing when you boot up.
When you install OS X over itself it removes these kernel extension files as they don't belong.
So I suspect it's software you installed AFTER resinstalling OS X when they didn't work is what is causing the problem. (likely the anti-virus, unless it's ClamXav)
Also it might be software installed when you log into the machine it's set to automatically launch, but that usually occurs after you log in and gives a Kernel Panic, (black screen and you need to restart message)
So what you can do is hold the Shift Key down upon boot, this will enter Safe Mode and you can uninstall and/or update those programs. Or reinstall OS X again to clear them out, then get online and check for updates to all your third party software.
..Step by Step to fix your Mac
Once you get your machine fixed, you should clone that boot drive automatically to another internal drive with Carbon Copy Cloner
That way you can hold the option key down and boot from the clone.
Most commonly used backup methods
Also you should be considering Deep Freeze at this time, as Apple is likley about to drop support for 10.6
Turn off Java in all your browsers and via the Java Preferences app, it's a major security risk (so is Flash, so use it off most of the time)
Use Firefox or (yucky spyware Chrome) as it's getting security updates and there is no Safari 6 for 10.6 (only not secure Safari 5.7.1)

Reinstall OSX Problem

My daughter has an Intel iMac early 2006. Upgraded to Leopard early 2008. While doing a routine update, power was cut. On rebooting, computer never got past screen with spinning ball. Using grey install disks, my daughter used disk utility to check disk. No problem, but computer refused to reboot. Finally, she reinstalled OSX Tiger using grey install disks but discovered that all of her data, folders, and programs had gone (e.g. no Final Cut, etc). She has some folders backed up on an external drive but not all.
Question: Are the data/programs that she had before now irretrievable? Will she need to reinstall all the additional software (FC, Office for MAC, etc) or is it still there and she can't see it? Will Disk Warrior be able to retrieve the lost data?

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Disk Warrior typically only repairs the directory.
To recover lost data you need Prosoft Data Rescue, or Subrosasoft Filesalvage and a Firewire external hard drive at least as large as your internal drive.
Check for content inside any Previous System folder. It may be stuck in there. Applications you can't find should be installable from their original system discs. If those discs are lost, contact the vendor who created those applications for replacement discs. Those discs may cost money, but typically less than full retail.

Help! 13" macbook pro will not boot. Tried running disk repair from HD recovery, not repairable. Trying to reinstall OSx Lion, says disc is locked. Do I have to erase the drive and lose everything? I also have Bootcamp installed, will boot to Win OK

Tried running disk repair from HD recovery, not repairable. Trying to reinstall OSx Lion, says disc is locked. Do I have to erase the drive and lose everything? I also have Bootcamp installed, will boot to Windows no problem.

Hotrodmkviii,
try rebooting in Recovery mode, but when you reach the Mac OS X Utilities menu, run Terminal (from Utilities in the menu bar) instead. Inside the Terminal window, give it the following command, and then press the Return key:
diskutil list
Please include in your reply the output from that command.

Ilife will not install after reinstalling osx

Hello,
I've had a few troubles with my macbook air 10.6.5 - and I was told it's probably a software thing, so I should reinstall osx, which i did. But when I try to install Ilife 11 from the usb pin that came with the computer, It keeps telling me that an unknown failure has accured and i can't install.
any ideas?
- Elias

Don't think this is quite answered yet. I just bought iLife 11 for my up-to-date system (24" iMac) and iLife wouldn't install outta the box. I found this thread and successfully installed iPhoto separately. After that, I ran the custom install again, deselecting iPhoto this time, and tried to install the rest. It failed again. I tried the good 'ol process of elimination and installed iMovie by itself with no issues. iDVD install failed but GarageBand and iWeb installs worked fine. This is very un-Apple and I'm disappointed. Good thing iDVD (or iWeb for that matter) wasn't updated in this release, otherwise this would be a bigger deal.
To recap, I installed each of the following apps, separately, in this order: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb. iDVD won't install. Hope this helps someone else.

Macbook Pro shuts down constantly, and rarely starts. Should I reinstall OSX?

Hi there,
I have a early 2011 Macbook Pro 17" with OSX Lion 10.7.5 and a bootcamp partition running Windows 7.
About three months ago some coffee was spilled on the keyboard, and afterwards was having some issues where it would shut down randomly. After a visit to my university's computer repair center, who told me there was a problem with the power button, and a visit to the local MacStore, who told me that the internals needed to be replaced for a whopping 1,300 dollars. I let the comupter sit for some time while I tried to figure out what to do. A few weeks ago I opened the machine up and cleaned areas where I could see coffee residue with 95% isopropyl alcohol. After letting dry for the evening, I started the computer up and it worked just fine for about two weeks.
Suddenly, when using the Windows operating system, it began shutting down when going to sleep. Following some advice on this site, I switched over to the Mac operating system and installed updates. On restart after the updates, the computer did not actually restart, and since, has started up to the grey screen with apple logo, makes a 'clink' sound and then shuts off. Rarely it actually starts to the desktop, and then 'clinks', goes black, and shuts off. When safe booting, and using the disk utility, it does the same thing. I have reset the SMC and the RAM.
When I am able to succesfully load the disk utility, it shuts down shortly after I begin the repair disk. I have tried this through the original install disk, and get the same results.
I haven't tried reinstalling, or erasing the hard drive and reinstalling OSX. I am worried about trying this as it seems like I might really screw stuff up if it shuts down in the middle of the reinstall or erasing. Am I correct about this?
Some posts here suggest that I need a firmware update of some sorts, but I do not see how I could do this if I cannot get the machine to start normall. Other solutions that might apply to this problem that I have found also strangely require the computer to actually be on and running.
Although I am willing to accept it, I have a hard time believing this is a hardware issue (e.g. logic board) related to the spill because of how long it ran without any problems.
I have been unable to get any sort of error report as well because of the shut down problem.
If anyone could help with my quesiton about reinstalling, and perhaps offer any other advice that doesn't involve me taking it to a MacStore I would greatly appreciate it. Its finals week and I could really use my laptop. It is a real pain being tied to a desktop.
Battery is fully charged, and does indeed charge.

Update on this: somehow the disk repair utility went through and I did a repair disk. There were no problems found. Computer worked fine for an hour, and then started asking me if I really wanted to shut down, which I did not. After doing this three times it made the characteristic 'clink', and shut off as described in my previous post.
Message was edited by: Njal1066

Reinstalling OSX mountain lion

My computer is acting strangely and stops all the time to work - I can hear lots of little hard drive sounds and it is very slow until it is done (usually about 10 minutes), and my Adobe CS products are crashing and creating corrupt files that keep stopping.
I tried to reinstall the system today - I couldn't use the installer that came with the computer because I have installed Mountain Lion since.
I tried installing from the 'Install OSX Mountain Lion.app" file, and it went through the motions and said it was installing, but now it appears to be exactly the same - normally I would get the welcome screen and have to configure things. It did not give me an option to do a clean install.
How can I do a new installation to get rid of the existing problems on this computer? It is only a year old (iMac i7) and has 8 gb of RAM so it shouldn't be so slow. My laptop is the same and is much faster.
thanks for any help.

I couldn't use the installer that came with the computer because I have installed Mountain Lion since.
FWIW (and future reference), you should be able to install the original system (if it was Lion):
If you use internet recovery (Command + Option + R), then the original OS version will be reinstalled after you wipe the drive.
If you use recovery (Command + R) the current OS version will be reinstalled.
If the originally installed OS version same with install disks (Snow Leopard or earlier), you can boot from that disk; however, in order to revert, you will need to wipe the drive first.
And, since you want to get rid of "existing problems", starting over with a clean install is best. You do not know if your problems are only caused by the OS or possibly some incompatibility of third party software which would not be fixed if you simply reinstall the OS over the top of what you have.

MAJOR HD PROBLEMS..disc cant be deactivated, trying to reformat and reinstall osx

As the title mentions, I cant seem to partition my HD in order to properly reformat and then reinstall osx..
I basically want a fresh new factory macbook with the original lion osx (dec 2011 macbook)..
Reasons why its not working out:
Macbook when turned on goes automatically in the options menu with reinstall os, DU, seek help online and set back a time machine backup (dont have)..
Already erased my hitachi 500 gb HD and the Macintosh HD partition a couple of times (on fastest way setting, and once in the 3 times overwrite setting which took 4 hours, not tried the safest 7 times overwrite way..)
Did a control disk with DU sometimes its fine and sometimes an error pops up saying it cant be fixed.
After trying to reinstall an os mavericks in this case, after 4 hours or 3andahalf it restarts itself in the same options menu (DU, reinstall, seek online help, time machine)..
Partitioning again wont work because the disk cant be deactivated. .
What to do guys? ?

In order to repartition the drive, you can't be using it as any kind of boot drive. That includes Recovery Mode since that is a hidden partition on the drive. So the OS won't let you remove the drive its currently started up to out from under yourself.
Restart in Internet Recovery Mode by holding down Command+Option+R so the Mac is running from the firmware. You'll get what looks like the same work screen as the regular Recovery Mode, but you'll be able to repartition and completely wipe the drive. Then install OS X. The version of OS X the Mac shipped with will be installed.
Do not upgrade it to any version of OS X past that, or the new owner will not be able to reinstall any upgrade since it would require your App Store ID and password to do so.
Already erased my hitachi 500 gb HD and the Macintosh HD partition a couple of times (on fastest way setting, and once in the 3 times overwrite setting which took 4 hours, not tried the safest 7 times overwrite way..)
For future reference, unless you're trying to protect classified government documents, or other highly sensitive data, there's no reason to do any more than a one pass erase. It takes expensive, specialized hardware and software to have even a slight chance of recovering data that has been written over even just once. There's no software consumers can buy that will recover anything from such a drive.

I want to reinstall osx lion ontop of my existing lion, but I'm not shure how to do it

I have a macbook air with osx lion 10.7.3 About 2 weeks ago i had to do a complete reinstall from a timemachine back up.Whene i did this i lost my repair partition that came with my copy of lion .My machine came with lion preinstalled from the factory.I have a timemachine backup copy on an external disk and can access the osx recovery utility from this by restarting and pressing option at the same time.If i choose reinstall mac osx lion will it erase my existing copy of lion or will it install over it

It will install a fresh copy of OSX, and a Recovery HD, without disturbing anything else.

Linux Install Problem

Hello,
I hope I'm in the right forum.
I have tried a triple boot on my macbook (http://support.apple.com/kb/SP504)
- extra partition for Win7 and Linux - installed rEFIt - Windows installation without problems.
But the Linux install fails.
(Tried to install with openSuse 11.3) The CD booted normally. But after I clicked on the "install"-Button, a green screen appears and nothing moves. I've also tried to install Ubuntu (10.4 LTS) but after the CD booted, a black screen appears and the screen is frozen.
After that I decided to reinstall my OSX, perhaps it helps. But that doesn't solve the problem.
Sorry for my bad english. I hope you can help me,
Max

Thanks for the reply. I figured it out on my own. Something to do with
specifying the directory or changing the current directory, I forget exactly which.

Missing /var/db files - not enough HD space to reinstall OSX

I'll try and keep this short and sweet:
I was messing around trying to do something foolish and managed to delete /var/db (I'm assuming this is the problem as my macbook fails boot at the apple logo and safe mode fails to recognize them). After digging around for a while I found this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3807743?start=0&tstart=0
I fiddled around for a while and eventually decided to try use my disks and reinstall leapord but there's a slight problem: I'm 3 GB short of backing everything up and reinstalling (the option to integrate the old and new system was absent, does anyone know why?) and don't want to format my hard drive.
Is it possible to install OSX on a USB hard drive, boot from that and copy the missing files over to my internal hard drive, or otherwise replace them?
If not, is it possible for me to copy everything to USB portable portable hard drive, reinstall OSX and dump them back (or more preferably acquire the /var files from somewhere else) and would I need third party software to do this?
I did not have time machine enabled.
I apologize if this should be a reply to the other topic but I wasn't sure if this being a different operating system/month later warranted a new question.

Is it possible to install OSX on a USB hard drive, boot from that and copy the missing files over to my internal hard drive, or otherwise replace them?
Yes, Macbook can boot OSX from USB Drives.
But clear off at least 15 GB, or OSX may self destruct hen you have less than say 8GB free space
I apologize if this should be a reply to the other topic but I wasn't sure if this being a different operating system/month later warranted a new question.
No, you did great, a new topic if not identical is the way to do it here!

How to reinstall osx and recover data?

Hi
If I reinstall osx 10.6.8 after hd format, and later connect my time machine external drive, will I get back all my stuff? I mean data, docs programs and so on?
After having played with a linux install, I found partitions ex linux I don't know how to delete and reassign to the mac hd, so I think the easiest way shoul be a fresh reinstall.
Thanks, Gianfranco

Thanks, my osx is already at 10.6.8. I had a lot of fun with Ubuntu, and even if I was warned about issues, wanted to try. I did it because some hardware will not be detected by osx. Afterwards decided to uninstall Ubuntu and switch to W7 for the above. Disappoint: ex linux partitions will not be removed by disk utility, and, more frustrating, Bootcamp does not allow to install Win because it finds that mac hd is not journaled. Of course is not: to be it expects a contigous volume, not parted. So, just to talk about my experience, mac architecture is very rigid, both in hardware management and software: it wants to decide where to store or pick data according to itunes philosofy (not mine) and, at the moment don't find any advantage respect Win/Linux exept a beautiful piece of furniture. Sorry for my complaints, you were very kind and gave me a helpful hint, but I'm starting to regret the iMac/iPad purchase.
Thanks for all, Gianfranco

Early 2008 iMac will not reinstall OSX or restore from backup

My system started rebooting on startup a few weeks ago. It would eventually get so I could use it. I backed all my important files except for some audiobooks from the library I had saved to iTunes and some archived emails on my HD. Now, I can't get the system to reinstall OSX Mavericks or restore from Backup. They start but then reboot. Disk utility is now showing the HD as verified. I installed the 6GB memory pack from OWC about 3 weeks before everything started to go downhill. I had no prior problems with the memory upgrade. I even removed the 4 GB module. Still no improvement. Does anyone have any Idea how I can retrieve my audiobooks and email files and save them on my PC laptop? Thanks!

When I try to boot up in Safe Mode, sometimes I get 3 beeps which repeat over and over. I tried to repair disk, it said to erase the disk, format and restore from backup. The backup stops after about 3 percent of the restore is accomplished. I am super frustrated!!!

I have had to replace the HDD and need to reinstall OSX.

I have had to replace the HDD and need to reinstall OSX but cannot find disc that came with the unit, does anyone know where I can get them from or download if possible?
James

[email protected] wrote:
Just how do you do an internet recovery on a system that has a blank HDD with no operating system that the unit cannot boot from????
If your Mac came preinstalled with Lion or Mountain Lion after you install your new blank HDD, restart the Mac while pressing/holding the COMMAND+OPTION+R keys until you see a spinning globe. Make sure you have an Internet connection (WiFi or Ethernet). This will boot into Apple's Recovery HD servers and present you with the OS X Utilities Menu. From there you can select Disk Utility to format your new HDD and then reinstall Mac OS X for the OS that was preinstalled.
Internet Recovery doesn't care if you have an unformated HDD because it boots over the Internet to Apple's servers, not your HDD.

Reinstalling osx over a linux install?

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