IMac performance degraded.

[lensteruk]

I have an iMac 2.4 Gig (2008) 3 with 2Gb Ram which has served me wonderfully well thus far but i have been experiencing some performance issues lately. I had a bit of a system crash a while ago which i think is at the root of the problem. It was fixed with support from Apple by doing an archive and install - and some permission changes. Cant remember exactly what tho.

I am now running snow leopard which has speeded up the machine but there are far too many beach ball moments and more importantly my son's PC is noticeably quicker to respond.. cannot have that situation

In short i am at the point where i have played around with the system and think that it is time to start again afresh with a clean OS X and only install what i need.

I have time machine running which backs up my entire hdd and have most of my data on a FW HDD

What i would like is a few top tips to ensure that i can successfully re install leopard - snow leopard and get apps such as aperture, imovie, itunes libraries reinstalled without having to re enter all of the meta data and keep current structures intact.

I have a mobile me account so anticipate that the cloud will assist with the migration there for contacts, mail etc. Also run an iphone and dont want to lose the backups, apps etc.

any top tips to ensure my journey is painless ?

[djackmac]

I think you should do some troubleshooting before just assuming the system needs to be wiped and reloaded. At least you have your data backed up with time machine which is very good. Go to Applications/utilites/disk utility and try to at least make sure your hard drive verifies okay. Another thing you can do is restart with your install disk in the optical drive holding the D key which will boot into Apple Hardware Test and you can use this to check your hardware to make sure all passes.

[lensteruk]

Hey thanks for the advice. I have carried out the hdd verification and all is good there. As for trying the Apple hardware test, I have inserted the Snow Leopard disc and tried holding D, also tried the Leopard Disc and tried holding D. Nothing happens - just boots normally. I think the issue is because they are both upgrade discs and originally the machine had tiger. I didnt get any tiger discs with the machine so dont know what to do. Cant even put Leopard back on as a fresh install... arrrrgggggggggg

[lensteruk]

Right, managed to find the techtool deluxe from the applecare cd and have updated it to work on Snow Leopard. The diagnostics showed the volume structure to have failed. Currently downloading techtool dmg so that i can boot into it and find some way of repairing the volume structure.

any ideas?

[djackmac]

Try booting to the installer and then going into disk utility. From the installer you will be given the option to repair the volume. If disk utility fails to repair the volume you may need something stronger like DiskWarrior.

[lensteruk]

Sorry to be dumb but how do i boot to the installer ?

[lensteruk]

OK so now i know that things are going against me.. downloaded and purchased diskwarrior but i cant boot from the disk. reading the text it would seem that i have to wait for the disk to arrive through the post before i can boot from it and repair the startup disk... any way that i can use the DW dmg file to create a bootable disk ?

[djackmac]

You should be able to mount the disk image and then go to disk utility to burn the mounted image. That's if its a full version and not one of the updates. For the updates you need the disk.