Mountain Lion Install Query

[snerkler]

Bit long winded, but please hang on in.

I have a 2012 (non-retina) 15" MBP 2.2GHZ i7 Processor, 8GB RAM with Crucial M4 SSD and recently upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion. Since this time my battery life has been shocking and it takes ages to shut down (15s compared to 2-3s previously). I went to the Apple store on Friday and they seemed to have cured it simply by running a diagnostic check (even though no errors came up). He did advise me to do a battery re-calibration which I did yesterday and now I have the same issue with long shutdown, although battery life does still appear marginally better.

So to try and sort this out I have decided to do a fresh install. I have made a bootable USB and so will wipe my hard drive and do the fresh install. What I would like to know is whether I can then restore from my time machine to restore all my programs and preferences? The real questions are:-

1) Will the 'new' OS recognise the 'old' back ups on the time machine?
2) If I restore from Time Machine will it just put back my preferences and programs or will it overwrite the 'new' OS with the 'old' OS from time machine?

Cheers

 

[Weaselboy]

1. Yes.

2. If you do a true "restore" from Time Machine it is going to put everything including the OS back like it was.

A true "clean install" involves a new OS install on a erased drive then manually reinstalling every app and setting on the new install. It can be a lot of work.

A less involved method would be to do the fresh install when at the end of the install use the Migration Assistant to import your old settings and data. This does not restore the old OS. This can potentially import whatever trouble you were having also, somewhat negating any benefit of the whole process.

 

[snerkler]

1. Yes.

2. If you do a true "restore" from Time Machine it is going to put everything including the OS back like it was.

A true "clean install" involves a new OS install on a erased drive then manually reinstalling every app and setting on the new install. It can be a lot of work.

A less involved method would be to do the fresh install when at the end of the install use the Migration Assistant to import your old settings and data. This does not restore the old OS. This can potentially import whatever trouble you were having also, somewhat negating any benefit of the whole process.

Thanks for your reply. I think I'll do some reading up on the migration assistant and try that first otherwise I'll try a complete fresh install. Is there a way of importing my iTunes and iPhoto onto a completely fresh install?

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for your reply. I think I'll do some reading up on the migration assistant and try that first otherwise I'll try a complete fresh install. Is there a way of importing my iTunes and iPhoto onto a completely fresh install?

Sure... just save your users ~/Music and ~/Pictures folders and their contents and drag them back in the same place in Finder.

 

[snerkler]

Sure... just save your users ~/Music and ~/Pictures folders and their contents and drag them back in the same place in Finder.

Thanks again.

 

[snerkler]

Fresh OS install didn't fix the shut down issue. Did a fresh install and tried it out just as the bare OS before putting anything on it and it still took about 15s to shut down :-( So just restoring from time machine now which puts the 'old' OS on and will see how I get on and will wait for an OS update.

Anyone any ideas what's causing the slow shut down? Tried running it in verbose mode but the text scrolls so fast I don't have time to read it, not that I'd know what'd mean anyway :-/