Complete and Total Uninstall

pingsmoth

pingsmoth

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Does anyone know how to completely rid my Mac of OSX? In the past few days I've had applications quit randomly, freeze-ups occur when my screen saver is running, I've had my Mac logout spontaneously for no reason at all (seems to do it after printing, though. odd) and refuse to mount disk images.

I ran the usual slew of fixes (Disk First Aid, fixed permissions, ran "fsck -y" on single-user startup...nothing worked. I reinstalled. I updated. It got so bad that applications would bounce twice in the dock and then stop, and never open. I even had iCab tell me it was missing a shared library that was there the last time.

*sigh*

I went through and from a 9.1 cd I delted System, Mach, Mach Kernel, along with all the invisible UNIX directories (Thanks, Resedit!) and anything starting with a period at the root level. I then installed Jaguar, basically from scratch.

Now my Mac freezes instantly on startup, but worse than before. The screen goes all fuzzy and I get an error message telling me I had better shut down my Mac pronto. So I'm using 9.1 again, and it looks like I'll be doing it indefinitely.

What I'm wondering in all this is how do I go about making sure I completely uninstall X so I can be sure I'm installing a clean version from scratch? Are there some files I'm forgetting to delete? Anything else that might do it?

Thanks a lot for any help.
 
Sounds like a typical 'bad memory' problem like so many have reported. Either your original memory, or what you have added may be suspect. Works OK in OS 9, but OS X is wacked. Try swapping with known good memory.
 
Thanks a lot for the tips. I'm running 10.2.0 right now with a few problems (random logouts, some programs quit for no reason) but it's usable.

The memory I've got is from Memoryx.com, but I don't know what brands. I tried swapping my two chips out to see if one of them is bad, but it didn't work. I would guess that it's a memory issue as well, since after installing 10.2.2 it freezes without accessing the hard drive.

Any suggestions on where to purchase good reliable memory?
 
Originally posted by pingsmoth
I went through and from a 9.1 cd I delted System, Mach, Mach Kernel, along with all the invisible UNIX directories (Thanks, Resedit!) and anything starting with a period at the root level. I then installed Jaguar, basically from scratch.
Click to expand...

Not smart... in case you didn't know... deleting the mach Kernel from 9 is a "no no."

Apple's recommendation is to wipe the drive and do a clean install from X.

As far as your other problems... This is not typical OSX behavior. (In case you didn't know). So I would start asking the typical questions, what kind of machine are you on? How much memory do you have installed?

I buy most of my memory from Crucial.com They are pretty cheap and I've never had a problem with any of the chips I've purchased from them.

Good Luck! ;)
 
I've done the above procedure several times, in fact. I had 10.0 which was just awful on my iMac (see my sig. for the tech specs) and "uninstalled" it by doing the same things. 10.1 and, for the most part, 10.2 worked beautifully for several months after installing them long after I had deleted 10.0.

The reason I'm so adamant about finding a solution other than doing a clean install is that a) I think it's a hardware, not a software, issue, and b) I have no way to back up several gigabytes of data. I've got no CD burner and no other computers.

If push comes to shove, my brother has space on his iBook hard drive, but it would take a while for the whole operation, and he's a very busy guy. :)
 
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