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I feel really bad for you. I've done the clean install dance three times over the past several years, and it's not fun. Fortunately the worst thing about is that it's really boring. Lots of time to practise your favourite instrument. But a clean install works.

Thanks, Shoosh.

Would you please give me a quick summary of the steps? Or just correct my guess:

1. Clone my current drive for files, projects and irreplaceable apps (?)
2. Boot from an external drive and format the RMBP's internal drive wiping it clean
3. Do a fresh install of Mavericks from the OS installer that is now in my apps folder
4. Reinstall all necessary apps & drivers that I have installers for
5. Make a clone of this "virgin" system
6. Copy back necessary files, projects, sound library, restore (e)mail (I don't know how to do that), and any apps that I can't install from fresh installers (if there are any).
7. Re-authorize everything
7. Make a clone of that version
8. Begin tests with either old or new RME driver (?!)

Do I have those steps about right? Am I overdoing it?

I get what you mean about the 100 lbs. Just going through my prefs is a long history of hoarding little freebies and stupid apps.

Bayswater, thanks for the commiseration and advice. Yes, I will make it a great practice marathon!! Great suggestion for extracting more positives from the situation!! I think I was probably due. It's been a few years since my last big hassle, and even that didn't require a ground-up rebirth.

You folks are truly the best. I'm glad I wasn't feeling completely alone in this minor madness.

THANK YOU!!!!

stubbsonic wrote:Thanks, Shoosh.

Would you please give me a quick summary of the steps? Or just correct my guess:

1. Clone my current drive for files, projects and irreplaceable apps (?)
2. Boot from an external drive and format the RMBP's internal drive wiping it clean
3. Do a fresh install of Mavericks from the OS installer that is now in my apps folder
4. Reinstall all necessary apps & drivers that I have installers for
5. Make a clone of this "virgin" system
6. Copy back necessary files, projects, sound library, restore (e)mail (I don't know how to do that), and any apps that I can't install from fresh installers (if there are any).
7. Re-authorize everything
7. Make a clone of that version
8. Begin tests with either old or new RME driver (?!)

Do I have those steps about right? Am I overdoing it?

I get what you mean about the 100 lbs. Just going through my prefs is a long history of hoarding little freebies and stupid apps.

Bayswater, thanks for the commiseration and advice. Yes, I will make it a great practice marathon!! Great suggestion for extracting more positives from the situation!! I think I was probably due. It's been a few years since my last big hassle, and even that didn't require a ground-up rebirth.

You folks are truly the best. I'm glad I wasn't feeling completely alone in this minor madness.

THANK YOU!!!!

I'm going to toss out my opinion which you can take or leave. I'm not much on cloning drives. In my life, I've never actually needed one. I've done it, but I never used the drives I cloned, and eventually threw them out to make room for backups. Why don't I use clones? It's the whole "clean install" thing. If I install from a cloned drive, I'm just risking copying over whatever was the original problem. It could be in any of 10,000 places if not 10M. If you have your drive backed up by Time Machine, you should be covered. I copy all my work files, pictures, and anything that is important to me into another location just so I can be sure I'm covered there. If Time Machine fails, I don't want to lose my life's work. Of course, I don't keep much of that on my boot drive anyway. I'll save all my applications somewhere, and I'll save the Application Support, Audio, Fonts and Preferences folders from the Library, again just to be covered. But I have a drive that contains basically every installer I've ever used, and I keep a file with all the serial numbers and installation instructions. The thing I have learned is to take your time and go through your files before erasing it. You want to be sure you've gotten everything you might ever want to keep. Your entire user folder, for example, should be saved somewhere. Libraries? Just go through them and see if they look like something you need to replace, or if the installers and apps will do it all for you. Again, Application Support, Fonts, Audio, and Preferences are definitely folders I keep. Also Preference Frames, and possibly Extensions, but most of those will be replaced by installers you've kept or can download. It's the ones that are old and can't be replaced that are necessary to have.

You might save the cloning for the virgin drive, before you start adding things. That way you at least have something to fall back to if you discover the bad-file the hard way.

Cloning once you're done is optional. That's your choice, of course. In fact, it's all your choice. Cloning may be easier. I don't know. It's just that I've never really felt the need for that. I like going through my files and knowing what I've got. That's just me. Others will advise you to clone at every chance.

Other than that, I can't see any holes in your list, but I haven't done it in a long time. I think I may be about to, though. You can cheer me on when I do!

Best of luck...
Shoosh

Great points, Shooshie.

My reasons for the pre-wipe clone are that I only have a superficial understanding of how to use time-machine- or how to work with it in a more flexible way than reaching back and restoring an accidentally deleted file, etc.; also, the clone would theoretically cover me if I overlook/forget something.

Today, I have to make sure I can find a folder called "Installers" that I have moved around many times. If it is gone, I don't think it'll be the end of the world. I have most of the recent stuff.

This may be a can of worms.... revisiting partitions.

I'm running everything on my RMBP's 500 GB built-in SSD. No externals. I'm not running huge orchestral stuff so I've not had any performance issues.

In the past, I liked having a partition for sound libraries & accessing things without permissions issues. But I got talked out of that, and have been using a single partition- but with a special resources folder at the root level where I keep some big sound libraries-- (I back it up periodically, and exempt it from Time Machine Backups.)

I'm happy with this method, but could be convinced to set up two partitions, one for almost everything, and a second for DP projects and big libraries. What do you think?

I'm not much on cloning drives. In my life, I've never actually needed one. I've done it, but I never used the drives I cloned

A bad drive or bad RAM can really screw up the process. Actually, it's a great way to diagnose bad RAM–your clones fail to complete. With bad drives, it's possible to complete but you don't know it isn't good.

I only use it with G4 and older Macs.

If cloning to an old drive, erase it and write to zeros. One time is enough for most. This forces the drive to write a new sector map to its firmware. All drives have bad blocks, even the newest. The sector map tells the OS not to write there. Bad disks will create additional bad sectors and should be tossed.

After three days of installing OS, apps, files, and plugins, I'm back up & running. Everything seems fine.

It was good to clear out old apps, files and prefs I no longer use.

I also discovered many new versions of plugins and apps, where the version I was using was ancient.

I still have lots of files to manange, but I'm in a pretty good spot. And most importantly, I can get back to work. I have a client this afternoon!! He's a good pal, so if there are issues, he'll be cool.

Pheeeeeeeew!

Thanks again!

Congrats!
Break a drive!

Must be a relief that's all over with. I think you'll be happy you did it in the long run.

DP just crashed on launch again. I didn't have the RME FF800 connected, so that driver technically shouldn't be engaged.

I did keep a good record of all the things I installed, so it won't take as long the second time around, I have no idea what is breaking it.

My client is coming in 14 minutes. Plan B: Garageband (?)

Brother!
I wish I had some magic potion for you.

I assume you did a clean download of DP when you did your re-installs?
Seems like a corrupted file somewheres.

In the past when I have (different, but similar) problems with apps (never like this with DP), I have re-run the install under either root admin or a different user, one with full admin privileges. Doing this once I found that I had some sort of problem with the account that I had been using, something was screwed up somewhere with file, etc. access privileges and using a different account got around that. Wish I had more to offer.

What about hardware issues?

Possible suspects (in order I'd suspect them):

1) Firewire or USB cable gone bad, or SATA cable
2) USB Hub
3) Drive with bad sectors somehow not getting rerouted
4) Bad Ram stick
5) PCI Bus screwed up (I saw that happen once)
6) Fan, temperature not getting properly controlled.
7) Flaky CPU core
Motherboard

Everything you've posted points to a bad plug in.
Not to step on any toes, but I've never done a clean instal to get rid of a problem, it's always solvable IMO by various simple steps. Plus the things solved by a clean instal are things like bad preferences and old drivers that are incompatible etc. Plug ins and new drivers that aren't compatible aren't solved by this.

The routine as to not get lost in this process is to take out 50% at a time of your plug ins. Testing the setup in between allows for you to isolate the plug in or plug ins that are causing problems. It's tedious, but it's effective.

Shooshie wrote:What about hardware issues?

I assumed this is only a problem occuring with DP? If other apps are crashing, it could be hardware. Are other apps crashing?

Michael Canavan wrote: take out 50% at a time of your plug ins. It's tedious, but it's effective.

Effective and not tedious. Surprising that more people don't do this. In 10 steps you can isolate which of 1,000 plugins is causing a problem.