Clean Installing OS X Yosemite | The three steps to clean installing OS X Yosemite

Apr 15, 2015 You will need to download the OS X Yosemite installer from the Mac AppStore. Once you have the installer and the DiskMaker app, follow the prompts to make a boot disk. At the end, it will give you the option to automatically start up from it. From there, you can access the disk utility to erase and reformat your harddrive and reinstall OS X. Once you’ve done that, here’s how to install, reinstall, or upgrade Yosemite, step by step: Boot from your Recovery HD partition by restarting your Mac while holding down the Command+R keys. The OS X Utilities window appears. Select Reinstall OS X, and click Continue. The OS X Yosemite splash screen appears. OS X Yosemite is free of charge, so no sale. Furthermore, OS X Utilities does not offer me an option, i.e. Any other version than Yosemite to reinstall - so even if I wanted, I wouldn't know how to choose Snow Leopard or the last version it ran on, Mavericks. Is a clean install done right, instead of making it complicated, showing files, hiding fi.

Do you want a brand new start on your Mac with no apps or files? A clean install of OS X Yosemite is just the thing for you. Now, there are three things you’re going to want to do in order to perform a clean install: clean up your Mac (which is a quick, easy task with CleanMyMac X), back it up with Time Machine, and then install a fresh copy of OS X Yosemite.

We’ll go over all three steps below. So, let's start with number one — Cleaning up your Mac.

Reinstall Os X Yosemite Disk Locked

Step 1: Clean up your Mac

So listen, you’re definitely going to want to do a backup of your Mac in case something goes wrong. To make that process easier, you should first clean up your Mac. It may sound like a daunting task, however, there are tools that can help you out, like CleanMyMac. Cleaning up your Mac with CleanMyMac X will save you time and the stress of cleaning it up yourself. Download CleanMyMac X and follow the steps below before backing up your Mac:

  1. Launch CleanMyMac X.
  2. Click Scan.
  3. After it’s done scanning, click Run.

And that’s all it takes to do basic Mac cleanup with CleanMyMac X. If you’d like to clean up more junk on your Mac, check out the sections on the left side of the app. It will help you take care of tons of other cleanup items. After you’re done cleaning the junk off your Mac, it’s time for the next step.

Step 2: Back up your Mac

Backing up is just good practice. If something goes wrong, you don’t want to be left stranded without a backup of your Mac. Now, if you don’t wish to back up your Mac, you can proceed to step three. But remember, if you don’t have a backup and something goes wrong, you won’t be able to recover or restore anything from your current Mac. With that said, here are the steps for backing up your Mac:

  • Go to your Applications folder and click Time Machine.
  • Click on “Select Disk.”
  • Select the external drive you wish to save your backup. An Apple Time Capsule is the ideal place to save it to. If you don’t have one, choose a different external drive.
  • Click “On” to turn Time Machine on; the button is located on the left-hand side of the menu.
  • To the right, below the name of the storage device, you’ll find, “Oldest backup,” “Latest backup,” and “Next backup.” Your backup should start within the next 5 minutes.

Once you’re done backing up your Mac, head to the next section.

Step 3: Clean Install OS X Yosemite

It’s time for a clean install. We’re going to show you how to do it without using a USB drive, which makes it much easier and less confusing. So to start, you should download OS X Yosemite from the Mac App Store. Once it’s finished downloading, it’ll immediately load up on your screen. Follow the instructions to install OS X Yosemite. Once it’s done, it’ll ask you to restart your Mac. Do it, and once it’s loaded up, we’ll start the clean install process:

  1. We’re going to restart your Mac again. But this time, hold down Cmd+R. (Keep holding it down while it restarts, do not let go!)
  2. Now, your Mac should load a screen with a few options (you can let go of Cmd+R now).
  3. Select the Disk Utility option.
  4. In the window, at the top of the left bar, select your Mac’s Main Drive. It should be something like MainHD.
  5. Now, select the Erase tab, located next to the First Aid button at the top-center.
  6. Near the center of the window, select the Format drop-down list and select “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)” as the type.
  7. Click Erase (this will erase your main drive!) and allow some time for the drive to format.
  8. When it’s finished, close out Disk Utility and select “ReInstall OS X” from the menu. It will ask for your Mac App Store password to redownload OS X Yosemite. Give it a minute to do so.
  9. A new window should pop up and OS X Yosemite should begin to install. If it does not, press back and enter your password again.
  10. Once again, follow the install instructions and enjoy your newly clean-installed OS X Yosemite.


I prefer using a USB key to reinstall Mac OS X (basically like the clean install you described), but Internet Recovery is so easy if you have broadband that it’s a great option. Very glad most Macs have this these days, I believe it’s any Mac that shipped after mid-2011 that includes the Internet based Install OS X ability, I used it on a. Mac OS Installer retail Version of Yosemite, El Capitan or Mac OS Sierra, choose one you desire to make the bootable USB. To get Mac OS X InstallerApps you can ask help from a friend who has “ real Macintosh” to download it from the App Store.

When OS X shipped on a DVD a good number of years ago, you always had the convenience of a bootable installer—an OS X installer that could be used to boot your Mac if its own drive was having problems. But to install or reinstall a recent version of OS X, you must either download a non-bootable installer from the Mac App Store or (via OS X’s invisible, bootable recovery partition) download 6GB of installer data from Apple’s servers during the installation process. In other words, you no longer have the same safety net or convenience.

Because of this, I recommend creating your own bootable El Capitan (OS X 10.11) installer drive on an external hard drive or USB thumb drive. If you need to install El Capitan on multiple Macs, using a bootable installer drive is faster and more convenient than downloading or copying the entire installer to each computer. If you want to erase the drive on a Mac before installing El Capitan, or start over at any time, you can use a dedicated installer drive to boot that Mac, erase its drive, and then install the OS (and subsequently restore whatever data you need from your backups). And if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk.

Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10 is another product in Apple’s line of Mac OS X. Apple, in its line of amazing Mac OX titles, launched the Mac OS Yosemite 10.10 which took the world by storm. It’s new improved features allow even greater synchronization between iPhones and Macs when using the Internet. Bootable USB Stick - macOS X El Capitan 10.11 - Full OS Install, Reinstall, Recovery and Upgrade.

(OS X Recovery lets you repair your drive and reinstall OS X, but to perform the latter task, you must wait—each time you use it—for the entire 6GB of installer data to download. At best, that’s a hassle; at worst, it’s hours of waiting before you can get started.)

Os X Yosemite Download File

As with previous versions of OS X, it’s not difficult to create a bootable installer drive, but it’s not obvious, either. I show you how, below.

Keep the installer safe

Like all recent versions of OS X, El Capitan is distributed through the Mac App Store: You download an installer app (called Install OS X El Capitan.app) to your Applications folder. In this respect, the OS X installer is just like any other app you buy from the Mac App Store. However, unlike any other app, if you run the OS X installer from that default location, the app deletes itself after it’s done installing OS X.

If you plan to use the OS X installer on other Macs, or—in this case—to create a bootable installer drive, be sure to copy the installer to another drive, or at least move it out of the Applications folder, before you use it to install the OS on your Mac. If you don’t, you’ll have to redownload the installer from the Mac App Store before you can use the instructions below.

Yosemite

Reinstall Os X Yosemite

What you need

To create a bootable El Capitan installer drive, you need the El Capitan installer from the Mac App Store and a Mac-formatted drive that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data. This can be a hard drive, a solid-state drive (SSD), a thumb drive, or a USB stick—an 8GB thumb drive is perfect. Your drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. (Follow this tutorial to properly format the drive if you’re using OS X Yosemite or older. If you’re using OS X El Capitan, use these instructions.)

Your OS X user account must also have administrator privileges.

Apple’s gift: createinstallmedia

In my articles on creating a bootable installer drive for older versions of OS X, I provided three, or even four, different ways to perform the procedure, depending on which version of OS X you were running, your comfort level with Terminal, and other factors. That approach made sense in the past, but a number of the reasons for it no longer apply, so this year I’m limiting the instructions to a single method: using OS X’s own createinstallmedia tool.

Starting with Mavericks, the OS X installer hosts a hidden Unix program called createinstallmedia specifically for creating a bootable installer drive. Using it requires the use of Terminal, but createinstallmedia works well, it’s official, and performing the procedure requires little more than copying and pasting.

The only real drawback to createinstallmedia is that it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard—it requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later. Though it’s true that some Macs still running Snow Leopard can upgrade to El Capitan, I think it’s safe to assume that most people installing OS X 10.11 will have access to a Mac running 10.7 or later.

Os X 10.10 Yosemite Download

(If you absolutely refuse to go near Terminal, an El Capitan-compatible version of DiskMaker X is now available, although I haven’t yet had the chance to test it.)

Making the installer drive

  1. Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive Untitled. (The Terminal commands I provide here assume that the drive is named Untitled. If the drive isn’t named Untitled, the procedure won’t work.)
  2. Make sure the El Capitan installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install OS X El Capitan.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).
  3. Select the text of the following Terminal command and copy it. Note that the window that displays the command scrolls to the right.
  4. Launch Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).
  5. Warning: This step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure that it doesn’t contain any valuable data. Paste the copied command into Terminal and press Return.
  6. Type your admin-level account password when prompted, and then press Return.
  7. You may see the message “To continue we need to erase the disk at /Volumes/Untitled. If you wish to continue type (Y) then press return:” If so, type the letter Y and then press Return. If you don’t see this message, you’re already set.

Reinstall Os X From Bootable Usb

The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying installer files to disk…Copy complete.Making disk bootable…Copying boot files…Copy complete. The procedure can take as little as a couple minutes, or as long as 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how fast your Mac can copy data to the destination drive. Once you see Copy Complete. Done., as shown in the screenshot above, the process has finished.

Reinstall

Createinstallmedia will have renamed your drive from Untitled to Install OS X El Capitan. You can rename the drive (in the Finder) if you like—renaming it won’t prevent it from working properly.

Reinstall Os X From Flash Drive

Booting from the installer drive

You can boot any El Capitan-compatible Mac from your new installer drive. First, connect the drive to your Mac. Then, restart your Mac (or, if it’s currently shut down, start it up) while holding down the Option key. When OS X’s Startup Manager appears, select the installer drive and then click the arrow below it to proceed with startup. (Alternatively, if your Mac is already booted into OS X, you may be able to choose the installer drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, and then click restart. However, sometimes OS X installer drives don’t appear in the Startup Disk window.)

Reinstall Os X From Usb Pc Camera

Once booted from your installer drive, you can perform any of the tasks available from the OS X installer’s special recovery and restore features. In fact, you’ll see the same OS X Utilities screen you get when you boot into OS X Recovery—but unlike with recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer.