booyaa dot org
my mac mini that is our media centre is on its last legs. it has a tendency to randomly crash. i initially suspected it was an overheating issue, but casual observation of iserver for the iphone seems to indicate this is not the case.
disk utility’s smart report seems to indicate there’s no physical problem with the hard drive. however after the last crash i there were a few corrupt files.
after a flurry multiple daily crashes i decided it was time to re-install the operating system.
everyone knows what a pain in the arse it is to rebuild a computer from the os up. you have to reapply patches and of course reinstall the applications.
whilst i did have the option to use timemachine, i felt it was inappropriate because there’s always a potential that the corruption (during crashes) might appear in the backups. so my plan was to image the hard drive using superduper. this way if the mac starts to crash repeatedly, i just need to boot off the recovery drive and re-image the hard drive.
now i did have some challenges to complete this project. the first was, the optical drive on the mac mini is toast. the second was, that i wanted to install tiger and then upgrade to snow leopard.
the optical drive on the mac mini wasn’t a problem as i had a firewire cable and would be able to use target mode using my macbook pro. installing tiger and then upgrading snow leopard was actually the trickiest bit, because a snow leopard mac doesn’t appear to let you do a tiger target mode install.
stay tuned for part two which will provide the actual steps i took!
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
