Did I just do a clean install? or just a regular install

September 10, 2015 3:03 PM

I have an “early 2009” Mac Mini that I am nursing along. It’s not my main computer but I do use it enough to want to keep it running smoothly. Last year, without putting a lot of thought into it, I upgraded to Mavericks from Snow Leopard. I noticed a hit in speed even though the reviews I was reading after the fact said the opposite should happen. Whatever. So this past weekend, I thought it’d try it again with a clean install.

My Mac Mini is a 2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM with a 120 GB hard drive. Not the latest I know, but it had been working fine in Snow Leopard, no problem streaming movies, lightly using CS4 Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. The hard drive was about 75% full. After the upgrade to Mavericks, I noticed the sluggish behavior and I took off some photos and documents so now it is 60%.

Over the weekend I decided to do a clean install to really clear it out. I found the instructions online and it was pretty straightforward. I downloaded a new install of Mavericks and put it in the Apps folder. I formatted a flash drive and in Terminal, I copied the Installer files to the flash, creating a bootable drive (this took an hour). I backed up my Mini hard drive in Time Machine to my external hard drive and then restarted the computer holding down the option key to boot from the flash drive.

That’s where it differed from the instructions I was following. I expected to see the icons for [MyMacMini] and [MyExternalHardDrive] and one icon for the flash drive. Instead there were two for the flash drive: I forget exactly what the names were (the flash drive itself had been labelled “untitled” per the instructions) but the two icons said something like [Mavericks Installer] and [10.9].

I figured they were basically the same thing so I clicked on one and a menu popped up with some options. I knew to not click on “Install Mavericks” because that’s just like doing a regular install. I clicked on “Open Disk Utility” so I could erase my hard drive and do a fresh install.

In Disk Utility, I clicked the Erase button and it was like “boop!” all erased. Now I thought it should’ve taken at least a half hour to erase plus, in the panel at the bottom of the Disk Utility window it still showed that I had like 72 GB of files and 47 GB of free space. No matter what I clicked on in the left panel of the DU window (i.e., it says "120GB Fujitsu" and underneath that it says "MyMacMiniName"; I don't have it partitioned), I could not get rid of the “72 GB used” info.

So I went back to the popup menu and clicked on “Install Mavericks”, which it did, took at least an hour, and then my Time Machine kicked on from the external hard drive and ran for (I forget how long).

I haven’t noticed any difference in speed, it still takes like, 10 bounces for Illustrator to open. Is there any way to tell if I did a clean install vs an upgrade? Did I erase my hard drive? This is what the system report says now:

Available: 46.87 GB
Capacity: 119.17 GB
Mount Point: /
File System: Journaled HFS+
Writable: Yes
Ignore Ownership: No
BSD Name: disk0s2
Volume UUID: 48A523B8-7FC1-349F-8A03-DEF55AF9EEE5
Physical Drive:
Media Name: FUJITSU MHZ2120BH G1 Media
Medium Type: Rotational
Protocol: SATA
Internal: Yes
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. Status: Verified


I can't wait to go through this again with my Windows laptop.

posted by TWinbrook8 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

These are dumb questions, but when you say that Time Machine ran, you mean you restored from Time Machine? If not, was all your stuff gone? Like, Applications and home folder down to the bare minimum?

The initial erase won't take long unless you do the secure format (writing zeros X number of times). The fact that you didn't see 0% used is a little strange, though. The OS alone (after clean install, of course) shouldn't be that much.

Speed wise... I wouldn't call restoring from Time Machine a particularly clean install. When I upgraded to an SSD, I connected the old drive via USB and used Migration Assistant, which is about the same; if I didn't have a bunch of automatic daemons and processes I wanted to keep in place I would have started from zero.

Side note: for my Mini of about the same vintage, putting a $80 SSD in it is about the best thing I ever did; better than maxing out the RAM.
posted by supercres at 3:16 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, but maybe obvious to you: an easy way to test out a clean install to see how much it helps is just to create a new user.
posted by supercres at 3:17 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

4GB RAM is pretty lean for Mavericks, you'd probably get much better results with 8GB, especially if you're using stuff like Illustrator. As long as you're doing a fresh reinstall you might also want to look into an SSD upgrade too (a 120GB SSD is seriously like $50 now, they're stupid cheap).

I'm not sure what happened with your disk reformat but it doesn't sound like it was a fresh reinstall. I don't think it particularly matters with OSX anyways.

(re: the format being quick -- it doesn't actually erase the data, it just marks that part of the disk as "available" in the partition table, allowing it to be overwritten.)
posted by neckro23 at 4:12 PM on September 10, 2015

Response by poster: re Time Machine
As I recall, the Time Machine started automatically. I was just finishing the "Install Mavericks" part, I think there was a button that said "Continue" and then the external hard drive started running. So I never saw an empty apps folder. However (sigh) for some reason TM had scheduled a backup around the time I was trying to upgrade. My TimeMachineScheduler app vanished awhile back.

oh shit, it just got serious.

Now I can't open Illustrator et al, I am getting an error code 150:30 saying the licensing for this product has stopped working. I restarted the computer to no avail. Mac forums just say that CS4 is not supported by Maverick and that Adobe is no help. Of course it was working okay before this weekend.

I do have the orig install disks and serial number. Should I uninstall via the Adobe uninstaller and then try to reinstall? Adobe is notoriously difficult but I guess it can't get any worse than what it is now.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:09 PM on September 10, 2015

CS4 should work in Mavericks. You might have to reinstall Java 6, though.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:53 PM on September 10, 2015

I second supercres' recommendation regarding a new user account. Often there is something you've installed that is dragging performance down. If you are using Migration Assistant to restore your files–which it kind of sounds like you are–you will end up bringing your cruft with you. You may find yourself right back where you started.

Here's a Macworld article on How to start fresh with a new user account that digs in to some of this stuff.
posted by sincarne at 11:34 AM on September 11, 2015

Response by poster: Okay, I see that I should've dragged my files over manually and that I can replace the hard drive with an SSD, had no idea they were so cheap.

I did reinstall CS4 and it seems to be working okay. I'll take another stab at this at a future date. Thanks everybody for your help.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 12:14 PM on September 11, 2015