Reformatting os x yosemite
The first is your main drive, and your partitions are underneath it on a next level. You will have multiple items if you only have one drive connected. What you instead need to do is arrow down once. Since you are running it off of a partition on the main hard drive, it will not let you do this. What you ended up doing was trying to format the actual hard drive, and not the partition. It should since it is a running operating system, although it may not since it's on another drive. As I said in the beginning, the recovery partition's presence doesn't make any impact on your actual installation and the installation itself is still clean.įortunately, Carbon Copy Cloner does clone the recovery partition of the source volume and archives it, so again.if it still migrates data from the cloned drive when installation, there's no real benefit and it isn't a clean installation at all. If it doesn't transfer anything, you could just create an external USB flash drive with the installation image instead, since that saves you a lot of hours, or use the recovery partition.
REFORMATTING OS X YOSEMITE INSTALL
If you want to keep all your data, you can install it from a cloned installation, assuming that it does migrate data as OS X normally does in that case. I'm curious as to whether it actually does that, but I'd imagine so for the reason stated above.
REFORMATTING OS X YOSEMITE UPGRADE
If you want to do a clean install, the extra step with a bootable clone isn't really necessary unless it doesn't upgrade you but actually transfers absolutely no data. I suppose it depends on what you want to do. I'm happy to be corrected here, since I haven't ever migrated data as using a cloned drive is very time-consuming and unnecessarily so. This is just logic speaking of course, since this is normally what happens when you launch the installer from a running OS X operating system. A bootable clone is an exact clone of your partition, and the cloning method will probably migrate your data and again treating it as an upgrade rather than a clean installation. A clean installation is an installation with no data on it whatsoever and freshly installed. The only reason I do not mention clearing the recovery disk as well is because it's a completely unnecessary step.Īs the recovery partition has no actual impact on the operating system itself, you're not going to gain any benefit from taking the extra time to put a bootable OS X image on your external hard drive.Īlso, a clean installation is not a bootable clone.