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What to Do When Your Mac Is Really Screwed, Or How To Reinstall Your Mac OS X

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You can reinstall your operating system from the DVD that came with your Mac.

Start from the DVD by holding down the "C" key on startup.

Connect you Mac in FireWire Target Disk Mode with another Mac if regular reinstall doesn't work.

Make sure you connect a PowerPC Mac to another PowerPC Mac, or Intel Mac to Intel Mac.

Oh-No, My Mac Won’t Start. Now What!?

What is “Safe Mode” and How Does That Help Me Anyway?

6 Steps to Solve Your Mac Problem

What to Do When Your Mac Crashes

Still No Answers? Try the Apple Discussions to Find the Help You Need

What to Do When Your Mac Is Really Screwed, Or How To Reinstall Your Mac OS X

By: Chris Kerins
Categories: Getting Help

Ai-yi-yi! Your Mac keeps crashing and won't operate. This isn't supposed to happen, right? Maybe it's not even starting up all the way. What do you do then?

If you can, go through My First Mac's 6 steps in Oh-No, My Mac Won’t Start. Now What!? But what if your Mac is still dead and those steps don't apply? It's time to go nuclear, and by that I mean it's time to reinstall the operating system on your Mac.

This is when you need to locate that DVD that came with your Mac so you can do a reinstall. If your Mac will run and recognize your install DVD, insert it and run the installer. It will restart your Mac using the DVD as the main disk and let you install wipe your main hard drive. If your Mac isn't starting from your main hard drive, it still might start from the DVD. Insert the disk and hit the power button while holding down the "C" key. That tells your Mac to start from whatever disk is in the optical drive.

At this point you can follow along from the installer instructions. Don't forget to hit the Options button where you then can select “Archive and Install,” and then select “Preserve Users and Network Settings.” This will save your old files and some settings.

Sometimes your hard drive is hosed and you'll need to do an Erase and Install. When you select this option, the drive will be erased, reformatted and the install will be brand new. That means that you will lose ALL the data from your hard drive. This is when you are really happy you've been backing up your data or really pissed that you haven't been. If you've been using Time Machine, you can easily get files back from there.

Really, Really Screwed

OK, what do you do when your Mac won't even get far enough along to start up from DVD? It's time for start your drive in FireWire Target Disk mode. What happens in this scenario is that you restart your Mac holding down the "T" key, enabling Target Disk Mode. When you connect your Mac to another Mac with a FireWire cable, it responds like an external FireWire drive

At that point, you launch the installer from the second Mac and select the "disk" that is the first Mac as the destination for the install. It's the same procedure as if you were to install the operating system on an external FireWire as a backup. By the way, that is a handy thing to do so you always have another option for starting up your Mac. It's also a good way to keep older versions of Mac OS X around in case you need them.

Really, Really, Really Screwed

This really happened to me. I went through the above steps with my 5 year old PowerBook I'm writing this on a short while ago. I had to do Target Disk Mode because my optical drive is out on the PowerBook. When the install came to an end, it told me it couldn't finish the install on my PowerBook hooked up to my Mac Pro. Or from from my MacBook. After a lot of searching on the web, I found out that an Intel based Mac can't run an install on a PowerPC based Mac. I figure that the install disk has 2 versions to boot from, and if it gets booted from an Intel Mac, it can't install a PowerPC Mac version. I don't know why, but that's the way it is.

At that point I realized I had to track down ANOTHER working PowerPC Mac, so I went to visit my Friend's G5 PowerMac. Once I hooked up the PowerBook in Target Disk Mode, it all went according to plan. And of course I ran Software update a few times, until the update that originally wrecked machine did it again. And then I started over. Again.

So before you kick your Mac to the curb or throw it through a window, don't forget that a reinstall will cure most any software problem. It won't fix your hardware, but it should get your Mac back to square one.

Do you have any war stories to share? Let us know in the Comments section below!


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Your Comments:

When you used target disk mode, you created a G5 install on your G4 Powerbook. I would expect problems.

Thomas
12/05/2008 at 08:39 AM

Coming from PC I had the old habit of thinking to reinstall the OS when things went wrong. I even forced myself to do it even though nothing was wrong just to learn the process. Of course, OS upgrades I did actually go through the process.

However, I have never in my whole history on the platform to date ever needed to. I can not break my OS X that badly that it ever warranted reinstalling anything.

One piece of advice would be to request all users who are worried about this to install something like AppleJack on their system. That way they have one last resort to try out before resorting to reinstalling the OS.

They simply start their mac up in Single User mode (command prompt, no GUI interface) and type in AppleJack and let it check the system and repair anything it finds out of sorts.

Even then, I don't even run AppleJack as often as I did, I vaguely remember the command I typed was AppleJack AUTO restart or AppleJack FULL restart that did a deep clean and repair of everything and automatically rebooted the Mac when it was done.

Something back in OS X version 10.3.x series I ran but not in 10.4 nor in 10.5 versions of OS X. It is now compatible with 10.5 so you can run it on Leopard if you so desire. A tiny program so you won't even know its there until you need it.

PC to Mac Converter
12/06/2008 at 06:10 PM

Don't forget that you will not be able to read the above if you have a crash. A second computer will enable you to access help. Second option is to print out your emergency options or a good Mac book can help.

John Smith
12/06/2008 at 07:12 PM

Sorry, bad advice.

Learning to do a bit of basic disk maintenance and doing it occasionally is a better solution.

It would be extremely rare to EVER need to reinstall Mac OS X. Even the "classic" Mac OS rarely needed such drastic treatment. Remember, Mac OS X is NOT Windows.

I've found that usually when strange, inexplicable things start to occur ... NOT connected to some odd piece of software I downloaded and installed on a whim ... that the real problem is disk directory damage. This might be the cause of things like files, applications or disk icons suddenly changing or disappearing, etc.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Disk Warrior

Yes, it's about $100, but it works! I've repaired numerous mysterious problems on my Macs and clients' Macs that have cropped up ... even disk icons disappearing and not being found even by Apple's excellent built-in Disk Utility!

Once I suddenly was unable to open my Trash. After a few days, I thought to try running Disk Warrior. Problem fixed. Why? Who knows.

I also run utilities such as Onyx (free) or Cocktail (shareware) that trigger UNIX commands hidden from normal users' view. They also allow for some tweaking and enabling of some hidden Mac OS X features, as well!

I run Cocktail, then Disk Warrior BEFORE running System Updates.

Check out http://www.macfixit.com for and basic or advanced advice and rational solutions to problems.

jeffharris
12/06/2008 at 10:49 PM

Jeff, I agree that one should run the utilities that you mention. They are often Mac-savers. Reinstall only when nothing else is working for you.

It would be great if you could write a post for MFM on the proper use of maintenance and repair utilities. What do you think? I bet it would be popular.

Chris Kerins
12/08/2008 at 01:06 PM

hey what about the apps? when i reinstall mac i lose everything?

kion
01/02/2009 at 08:20 AM

kion, when you do an Erase and Install, you will lose your apps. Your Apple apps are are the install disks, but the others will need to be reinstalled. However, if your situation is not that dire and you can do an Archive and Install, your Apps will remain.

Chris Kerins
01/02/2009 at 10:02 AM

This is likely in the wrong thread BUT among the flukes going bad on my (never reinstalled) OS (Tiger) is the sudden inability to load (search, open links, index) Mac Help period so I can find out about the basics (zapping pram, restore vs clean install, etc)?

rob
01/09/2009 at 12:35 PM

The BEST way to reinstall or restore a hard drive, is to do what's called (or was) a clean install.

CLONE your hard drive to a second hard drive. Use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. A FireWire hard drive is best, FireWire 800 is better. USB drives are extremely slow/inefficient for copying files. (Don't believe me? Google it!) Get a 7200 rpm drive. Any extra speed is a good thing!

Then do an ERASE and Install of Mac OS X.

With the cloned hard drive connected, when the Mac OS X installer's Migration Assistant kicks in it will ask you what it should do. With a cloned drive, it's "From Another Volume" (I'm paraphrasing). The cloned drive is good to have around just incase you discover that a file or preference is missing, etc..

The Installer will copy all you apps,documents and preferences and put them in the proper place.

The clone method also works for great for creating a bootable backing up of you main hard drive. I clone my boot drive every week or so, before going to bed. Time Machine handles daily backups on another external hard drive.

it may sound expensive to have two extra external hard drives, but getting into the habit of backing up can save you MUCH more money and MISERY if your hard drive fails. Years ago, it cost me $1200 to recover a 6GB drive, not to mention lost files! It costs about the same to recover a 250GB drive today.

You can get a 500GB LaCie Quad interface hard drive from J&R;for under $140!
http://www.jr.com/lacie/pe/LAC_301440U/

jeffharris
01/09/2009 at 01:40 PM

The latest "Security Update" from Apple froze up my iMac last week - it would only boot up to the blank blue screen, and hang there. Safe Mode wouldn't boot up... a few tricks in Single-User mode yielded no results. To top it off, my 3-year old had just recently stuffed business cards into the disk drive, so booting from the Install CD was a crash as well.

So, not having any friends with Macs to try Target-Disk mode, a trip to the Genius Bar was in order. They booted from a USB drive, did an Archive & Install, and after a day or so of copying files & restoring settings, I'm back up & running.

Was not too bad of an experience, all in all, but that stuff about "OSX never needing a re-install" is baloney.

Kevin
02/21/2009 at 10:01 PM