So the other day I was all set to install Vista and Ubuntu on my Mac so I could triple boot whichever I wanted. However when I went to partition my drive to install Vista with Boot Camp it told me I needed to reformat my drive.

So I did one last Time Machine back up and reformatted and then restored my system via the Time Machine back up and Migration Assistant. My first problem was that all my applications were gone, yet it said it had fully restored my system.

A bit of looking around turned up my Applications in a folder named “Applications (from previous system)” which seems kinda stupid to me because it was meant to restore my system to it’s previous state, so why did it put my Apps in a different folder?

Anyway I got all that sorted and then went to use the Boot Camp Assistant to partition my drive, only to discover that Boot Camp assistant was missing, as were all my other Utilities. The Utilities folder in the Applications folder includes all the system checking things like Terminal, Activity Monitor and Disk Utility. Not things I use all the time but are often essential.

I went to my Boot Camp back up manually and checked on there, they were missing from in there too. So my next step was to use a program called Pacifist to extract them from the Leopard install disc. It half worked with some of them working and some saying they couldn’t work on this file system.

In the end I reinstalled Leopard again and am now Migrating my old account onto my new install as a new user, rather than the only user like I did before. I also copied the Utilities folder onto an external drive so that if they’re missing I can copy them over manually.

After that I’m gonna install Vista and then see whether I can be arsed with installing Ubuntu.

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