Re-Installing Mac OS X Lion, Regarding permissions...

[Shadrack]

Hi!

Messing with system files I'm afraid I may have corrupted one, and I want to re-install Lion to see if that clears things up. I have my home folder on a separate drive, while my system drive holds system files and applications.

I've tried restoring these files from a time machine backup and think that even my backup files may be corrupted.

My plan is to reinstall Lion, setup my user accounts to be the same username/password, and then point the home folders from the Advanced Options in the Users & Groups pref pane.

Will I have any issues with file and folder permissions if I do this? Should I also copy the UUID of my user accounts before proceeding?

I recall that the permissions of home folders in Mac OS X can be a little tricky.

Thanks.

[.Neo]

I always make a copy of my home folder on my external drive. I've never ran into any permission issues when copying things back after I reinstalled Mac OS X.

[Shadrack]

Re-installing Lion was painless and it didn't change anything because I hadn't formatted the drive. So long as all the critical Lion system files got replaced, that is what I was after.

It didn't fix my issue, however, which was a terrible lag in Finder. Everything I clicked on took a few moments to open. This problem only existed in Finder. Everything else was extremely snappy, and my HDD and SSD had nominal read/write speeds.

I logged into another user account and found that there was no lag in Finder. So I basically just created a new account, copied all my important stuff over, and deleted the old account. Something was corrupted in my user settings somewhere that Finder did not like at all. Now, everything is snappy again. Wish I knew what went wrong, but am content that my Mac is working as expected now.

[AltecXP]

I reinstalled over my wifi for my Air. It went nice and smooth.