Reza Ghafari

Clean rebuild to Mountain Lion

As this was my first Mac, I had done lots changes here and there to experiment and it was time to start afresh. Also I wanted to get rid of stupid packages and applications that I had installed in the past few years (including Xcode!)

When it comes to MS Windows installation I am an expert but in the Mac world I am hopeless.

Searched the Internet for ways to cleanup the hard disk and start a clean OS and saw different ways of doing it by different people.

The best way that works for me was:

  1. Shutdown
  2. Press cmd+R and power on (You can also restart and do this)
  3. System goes into recovery mode
  4. Format the entire disk
  5. Install the OS from Internet

This saved me from creating boot disks, etc.

See: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718