Reinstalling da Mac

[IBM]

Okay, I've had enough. The G5 is pants...reliability wise I haven't had a computer which crashes this much since the mid 90s.

So, I'm backing up everything I can find...primarily the primary user account....and then I'm going to go for a clean install of Tiger (Pather? Couger? Tabby? Which one's the latest, I loose track).

Is there anything else I need to make sure I've got? My Entourage settings are held in the Documents directory, all my music, vids, and work are in their respective directories inside the primary user account. I've copied a few files that managed to find their way up into the root of the boot disk.

Am I missing anything? I'm assuming all bookmarks and other user settings are to be found within the primary user account.

My upgrade copy of Creative Suite CS2 arrived yesterday, so that'll be the first thing to go back on. Does anyone know if the original copy you're upgrading from needs to be installed first before you install the upgrade, or do you just need the serial number?

This better work stability wise...I've wasted too much time on this machine already...

[Jonny M]

Run the hardware test that you got on the original install media. You might have a hardware fault somewhere.

[Red10]

Okay, I've had enough. The G5 is pants...reliability wise I haven't had a computer which crashes this much since the mid 90s.

Hmm, i'd do as caged suggests and do some sort of hardware test, none of my macs [or any other mac i have used] have crashed regularly (if they do, it's very infrequent)....

[IBM]

Oh well, it's done. I used the disk utility et al and everything came back fine (apart from when the 100Gb I was copying across to the 2nd drive caused the system to lock up, resulting in me force powering it down, which lead to the drive getting screwed, in the end meaning I had to format and remount...fun).

So I went ahead and reinstalled. No biggy, copied the primary user and everything I need seems to be there. All the software went back on fine, and so far I haven't had a crash yet.

I will clarify that the crashes were of the individual software variety (Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Word, Excel etc) rather than general system crashes, although there were a few of those.

When I first started researching the instability, it turned out that it may have been caused, in part, by the fact that I replicated my Powerbook straight onto the G5, something which several people pointed out caused problems because of the difference in system architecture. There were also a lot of 'bad' fonts on the system, something which came to my attention when reimporting everything back into FontBook, so that can't have been helping.