Fortunately there was another empty partition on the hard drive, so I
had her install a fresh 10.3.4 on that, and after a lot of work
changing ownership of her old files (from Unknown and Staff and You
Have No Access), we got her mail database and documents moved over and
working. So we're up and running again now with a fresh install.
Bruce Johnson wrote:
Oh dear.
The easy way to avoid that was to boot from the Panther CD and do an
Archive & Reinstall installation; that completely replaces the System
folder, and replaces all the Apple apps, but keeps all your user
information intact. Takes about an hour on a sufficiently fast
computer...
Thanks, Bruce. I was wary of trying that because I recalled hearing that
there might be problems reinstalling OS X if the install CDs (10.3) were a
lower version than the installed OS (10.8). By this time my mom was losing
all hope that we would get anything working at all, and she was about ready
to send the Mac back to me and go back to the Windows boxes my other sister
wants her to use.
So I went for the quickest, least complex thing I could think of that I
could tell her how to do over the phone, that I was pretty sure would
result in at least one working install of the OS. Once she saw a working OS
she was much happier right away. (She didn't have a lot of important
documents that weren't backed up elsewhere, so the user information in this
case was a secondary concern.)
But for future reference: is there a problem with CDs being an older
version than the installed, updated version, or does that problem not apply
to Archive and Reinstall?
thanks,
Beverly
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