I Just recently upgraded my old first generation iMac (Flat panel, 800Mhz) and I have to admit I’ve been lazy. I have never run ‘disk permissions repair’ or ‘disk repair’ in the three plus years I have used this Mac. This is mostly as there appeared to be nothing wrong enough to use these tools. I started out with 10.2, upgraded through 10.3.9, but when I tried to move to 10.4, it failed citing ‘software errors’
So I actually had to try a ‘permissions repair’, no problem, it found a couple miner issues and fixed them. Then came the ‘repair disk’ under first aid, bad news, it could not repair the disk. And I thought, S__t I have to back it up. Good thing I have this external Maxtor, and I started a full backup. 20 Hours later it finished. Fearing the worst, I started a cleanup and moving some of the my important files, (iTunes songs, ect) to DVD-Roms. When I started to clean up some of my Virtual PC disk images (version 5) I had a disk copy failure on an image file of a Lycoris install I had created for testing. I finally managed to delete it, and got inspired to try the disk repair again, and bingo, it fixed the problem.
Now if the disk repair application could have told me I had a bad file, I could have saved a lot of time, heartburn and grey hair and I could have just removed it. It wasn’t that hard in my opinion, so why didn’t the disk repair just not offer to remove the offending file. I have no clues.
Other than that, the install was easy. And I’m a bit wiser. Backups are good, backups are wise.