New (used) iBook: How to reload system

[sambachman]

I'm fairly new to macs but got a 17" IMac in September and loved it so much bought a used 600 Mhz white iBook with an airport card (and OS 9 and 10.2.3). It apparantly has an 18 gb hd with only 10 free. Since I got it, I did delete all of the native applications and added 256K Ram and upgraded to X 10.2.4. Despite deleting a bunch of stuff I still only have 10 gb free and yes I emptied the trash. I did not get system disks or software restore disks with the purchase. Now I know better!

Last night at the apple store, the rep there said I should wipe out clean/start fresh (etc.) the hard drive by reloading OS 9.2 (boot from disk), then OS X, then Jaguar, then online update to get a clean system, from my iMac 17" software CD's I do have.

Since I did not get system or software restore disks with the iBook, I thought I could use my disks that came with the iMac.

The iMac software restore disks won't work. I did install 9.2 with the "clean install system" preference checked but noticed I still had applications from the previous owner.

My question is: should I even worry about reloading the system to reclaim presumably used HD space (7-8 GB seems like a lot for just the basic systems and software) or just leave everything alone and get some utilities such as Drive 10 (to be free ugraded to TT 4.0) and/or DiskWarrior to do it?

[sambachman]

Sorry, Clarification needed on my post.

I deleted applications that seemed non-native from the previous owner like limewire, Office 98, pagemaker. Was not easy as I had to "get info" to change permission to me on every app and folder from the previous owner to me before I could delete.

I also followed the procedure to add myself as a new administrator and then could only delete the former owner's admin function by logging on to the Root and then deleting the former owner.

Interestingly, even though I deleted this previous owner, I had to "claim" his old files as my own before I could delete them.

[fbp_]

could the 'lost' disk space be his deleted user folder? when you delete a user from the pref pane the contents of their user folder gets put in a /users/deleted users/

[michaelsanford]

There are a few reasons your 7-8 GB might be missing:

1. The HD was partitioned with slack space (i.e., you may have only one partition, but that one partition might not be the size of the entire drive).

2. fbp_ might be right, in that the user folder is still somewhere on your drive (in /Users/old_username Deleted).

3. The third possibility as to why there is a missing 8GB: he lied to you and the HD isn't actually 18GB

Though I'm always hesitant to suggest a full re-install, it's totally warranted in this secnario.

Reinstalling a "clean" OS 9 System Folder will NOT affect any of the OS X applications that were previously installed, which is why they're still there. All "clean install" does is create a new OS 9 System Folder without any third-party extensions.

What you need to do is boot from your OS 9 CD and before you do any system installations, use Drive Setup (on the CD in Applications: Utilities: Drive Setup) and reformat your hard disk, checking for bad sectors and all. Make sure you format it as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and that the partition fills the drive space.

This will also ensure that your data partition is the size of the entire drive.

Doing this will remove absolutely everything from your hard disk, old applications, user's folders, etc, and give you a feshly clean drive. Then you can go ahead and install OS 9, OS 10.2 and Software Update everyting...

It hopefully goes without saying: if you have anything on the disk you want to keep back it up!