Erasing drive

I am giving my macbook pro to my son and need to erase my password and authorization information. Can I do this without wiping the drive clean?

Yes, it can be done. But it would probably be easier to erase the drive and install the operating system again from the Install DVD for that Mac.
Allan

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Brand new Mac, had to erase drive through disk utility as time machine back up failed. Now disk utility only has the option to install Mountain Lion which my Mac won't allow. Anyone any ideas as my Mac won't load anything up but disc utility!

Brand new Mac, had to erase drive through disk utility as time machine back up failed on initial setup, USB cable popped out Now can only access disk utility as won't load to log in screen. The only has the option in disc utility is to re-install Mountain Lion which my Mac won't allow or loading another time machine back up but after an hour of it processing, that didn't resolve the issue either! The time machine back up is the latest back up of my Mac Book Pro which was using OS X Maverix. I'm guessing I'm going to have to take my Mac to the store but that would be a hassle so does anyone have any ideas?

Follow this guide using another Mac.
Insert your newly created Mavericks USB into you Mac, press the power button and then hold down 'option,' until it gives you an option to boot from the USB. You will then be able to erase the internal disk with Disk Utility and reinstall Mavericks straight after.
After that you should be able to use Migration Assistant to restore your applications and user data.

Installing Leopard on an erased drive

I purchased an iMac on eBay. It came with the previous owner's stuff still on it (incl. Tiger). I wanted to do an erase/install of Leopard, and then transfer my files from my previous computer. In the midst of the erase, the power cord accidentally was pulled. When I restarted the computer, the drive was apparently erased, and the installer said that installing 10.5 required the presence of 10.4, which it couldn't find. I inserted the 10.4 install disc, to install that, but the computer won't boot up from that (or any) disc. Even when holding down the "C" key, I only get a gray screen with a folder/question mark icon.
Would appreciate any suggestions as to how to get Leopard installed on this erased drive!

the installer said that installing 10.5 required the presence of 10.4
So these are Leo upgrade disks and not a retail version of Leo?
It appears that your power cord mishap has resulted in an unconfigured HD that is undetectable. This can be an expensive proposition. Folks with Windows installation mishaps have endured the same results. I posted an unofficial solution from Jon Glazerman, which has proven successful for others and it should work for you as well.
Solution
Since the Mac will not boot the DVD, we'll create an Intel Mac-bootable external installer drive.
What You'll Need:
• A working Mac
• An external hard drive you are willing to format (Firewire only was tested)
• Apple's Disk Utility
• Mac OS X Install Disc 1
• An installed copy of NetRestore v3.3x (Freeware)
Procedure - on your working Mac
1. Insert Mac OS X Install Disc 1 into your DVD drive.
2. On your hard drive, open NetRestore Helper (see above section if missing)
3. Make sure the "Create Master Image" tab is highlighted.
4. At the Master Disk prompt, select Mac OS X Install Disc 1.
5. Select the "Read-only compressed" radio button.
6. You may check the boxes below to skip checksumming and post-processing at your discretion.
7. Click the lock icon in the lower-left corner of the NetRestore Helper window and supply your Username and Password. Once successful, you'll be able to click the Create Master Image button.
8. You'll be prompted to name and save your install disk image. The image creation process could take 10-40 minutes depending on your Mac's capabilities. After a successful image is made, you may close NetRestore.
9. Connect and turn on your external hard drive if not done already.
10. Open Disk Utility and select your external hard drive in the left column display. In the lower right, look for Partition Scheme. If this says "GUID Partition Table", skip to 15.
Important: To make this external drive bootable on an Intel Mac, we need to make sure it's the proper format. You are about to delete the contents of your external drive. You may wish to create a backup before proceeding.
11. Make certain your external hard drive is selected, and click on the "Partition" tab just below your button bar.
12. Name your external hard drive and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
13. Toward the bottom of the window, click the "Options..." button. Select "GUID Partition Table" and click OK.
14. Click the Partition button and confirm.
15. Select the Restore tab and drag the disk image you created with NetRestore onto it. Or you may click the Image... button to locate the image of your install disk.
16. Drag your external hard drive partition from the left column into the Destination field. You may optionally check the Erase Destination box and then click the Restore button.
Note: If you have still have the installer disk image open in another application (such as the Finder) you may receive an error from Disk Utility until this image is closed in all other applications.
After verification, you may close Disk Utility.
17. Using the Finder, check to make sure your external hard disk file layout resembles your Mac OS X Install Disc 1 DVD. Big discrepancies may indicate a problem in creating the image or restoring the image.
18. Dismount the external hard drive from your working Mac.
Procedure - on your Core 2 Duo Mac
19. Connect the external hard drive cable to the non-booting Core 2 Duo Mac. You'll want the Mac turned off for booting purposes. Turn on your external hard drive.
20. Turn on your Core 2 Duo Mac while holding the option key. The gray screen will be blank for several seconds, followed by an icon for your external hard drive. You should be able to click on this icon and begin the Mac OS X install process. It may not work on the first try, so you may need to power off the system and try again. Also try a USB keyboard and mouse instead of Bluetooth.
Note: If the Max OS X installer runs, but is having trouble identifying your internal hard drive, launch the Disk Utility first and format it using the GUID Partition Table before continuing.
At this point, your Mac should be able to read your second install disk from the DVD drive without issue.
I really hope this fix works for you and you can start enjoying your new Mac again. Again, there may be other methods (for example, booting the install DVD from an external firewire DVD drive) but whatever the case, good luck and thanks for reading.
Jon Glazerman
Kansas City, U.S.

Can I Re-install 10.6 on iMac hard drive without erasing drive?

My OSX based spell check for mail, text edit, and other programs that use the system spell check no longer have any spell or grammer check functions. I have isolated it to know it's the OS spell checking function, so now want to re-install my system. I have found the original system disks, and want to know if I have to wipe my entire hard drive in order erase and then install just the system? I have a Synchronize generated bootable backup of my entire hard drive, but then it will install the current system probably including whatever problems the system software has now. I suppose I can make another back up that is not the bootable kind, but I would really like to not lose all my settings on everything.
Any suggestions?

Installing an OS will not erase user data. With that said a backup is always wise to have. Use your original disks and then update to 10.6.8.
Ciao.

How can I restore the recovery partition of Lion without erasing drive?

Hello there,
I have a mid-2011 MBP equipped with Snow Leopard, but at one point I needed to access the AHT, which doesn't boot from the second DVD, released months before. It turns out this Mac requires AHT to run from Lion's Recovery HD partition. Since this Mac doesn't contain any Lion software, is there a way I could install the content of Recovery HD without reinstalling Lion itself so I can have the AHT ready if I need to? Of course I don't want to erase nor get rid of Snow Leopard. Drive is not original.

Apple Hardware test is only available two methods on Intel Macs
Pre-July 20, 2011 Macs through the prebundled installer discs you can order for around $20 from AppleCare if you lost the disc. The 'D' key boot then boots off the disc that contains the hardware test
Post-July 19, 2011 Macs through the 'D' key boot (no CD/DVD necessary, and no installed software necessary)
Both methods are described here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509
Dates given are based when the vintage of the Mac was sold through Apple authorized retail stores, and not when you bought an operating system or purchased used or refurbished.

After erasing drive, tried to use Internet Recovery to download a bootable system

hi
i need some help.
after erasing the drive on my macbook Air, I tried to use Internet Recovery to download a bootable system, but after going through the motions of the spinning world globe and (probably) actually downloading something (it takes between 45 minutes and 1 hour to finish) and after it restarts, it cant find any system, and subsequently gives the folder with question mark, not able to find any bootable system.
what am i doing wrong?
how can i get mountain lion on it (like before) so that i can upgrade to mavericks?
thanks

The Online Internet Recovery system, Cmd + Option/alt + r keys at startup, will give you whichever OS X version originally came on that Mac when it was shipped from the factory new. That is IF it originally came with one of the Download Only version of OS X, Lion, Mt Lion or Mavericks.
If it originally came with Lion Yes you will need to buy Mt Lion from the Mac App Store or get Mavericks for Free. If it originally came with Mt Lion the newer Point version of that will be downloaded and installed.

Can't update - Leopard asks for erasing drive

I've just successfully updated iMac and wanted to do the same on my MacPro, where I have BootCamp. During installation, Leopard doesn't want to do update (Macintosh HD drive as well as others has yellow screamer mark), but wants to erase my drive and do clean install. Any idea why? I don't want to do clean install. It doesn't offer any other option that clean install.
<Edited by Moderator>

here is one bummer which I found: Looking at DiskUtility, I can see greyed "disk1s3" drive under my Macintosh HD.
Mount Point : Not mounted Capacity : 128,0 MB (134 217 728 Bytes)
Partition Type : Microsoft Reserved
Available : -
Owners Enabled : - Used : -
Number of Folders : - Number of Files : -
ok, sounds like I'll have to do Erase and Install, but what's going to happen to my BootCamp stuff? I have WinXP 64bit there. I believe WinXP should be fine itself, but, will I'll be able to snap it again when will intsall Leopard?
<Edited by Moderator>

Time Machine erase drive help?

When setting up Time Machine on an external HD partition, I select a 500gb partition on my HD it asks to erase the drive. When I select yes will this only erase that partition or might it format the whole HD and therefore loose all my files on the other partition?

Ok I got impatient and just did it. But rather than letting TimeMachine do it I Used the disk utility to format the specific partition into MacOS Journalised format and then Time Machine was fine.
I imagine TM would have just done exactly that but imagine if it had formated the whole drive and removed my partition. So my advice is don't tempt fate and do it yourself in Disk Utility

Need to reinstall Panther on a completely erased drive on my iMac... Help?

Here's the history:
I had the SMART status failing notification but my drive was still working so I backed up all of its contents to an external hard drive.
I sent my iMac into the Apple store and had the drive completely replaced (under warranty).
When I got home, I started it up, but didn't want to go through the full reinstall and upgrade of the system. I tried to restore from my ext HD using Disk Utility – this required a complete erase and reformat of the drive. The restore didn't work since there wasn't enough space.
So I then used Carbon Copy Clone to create a disk image of the ext HD and tried to restore from the disk image to my iMac. That also didn't work because of disk space.
I then deleted some of the user documents to free up about 40GB of space to minimize the amount to clone. Instead of restoring from a disk image though, I restored through the backup in CCC. This worked, but when I went to reboot the iMac, it wouldn't. It got through the gears, but then went black and said there was no system. It went through 10 retries and then just stopped.
I am now trying to reinstall from the Mac OS X Install discs, but this isn't working either. I insert the disc, and hold down the "c" key to start up from it, I get to the select destination and the drive has a red exclamation warning on it saying the system can't be installed onto the drive.
I'm completely out of answers
Any help would be greatly appreciated This is my workhorse computer for my design studio at home (I am self-employed) and I'm relying on a laptop for now.
THANKS

NT

Is there a way to recover iPhoto library after erasing drive and clean install of Mavericks?

Is there a way to recover the photos in my iphoto library after erasing my SSD drive and reinstalling mavericks? My time capsule backed everything up except iphoto, and I had 3 years worth of important photots in there. Is there any way to recover them?

In addition to using a Time Capsule drive and using Time Machine, with this painful lesson learned, in the near future, purchase another high quality, high speed (USB 3.0, Thundetbolt OR FireWIre 800 depending what connections are on your Mac) external hard drive, formatted for Mac, and use a data cloning app such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make bootable clones/copies of your Mac's entire internal hard drive.
Bootable clones and data cloning apps are the best and most reliable way of creating reliable backups of your important data in the future.
Also, my other advise stands, too! If you have data the is like "gold" to you copy this data manually to other media such as CDs/DVDs and/or high capacity USB flash drives.
Sorry you have lost your precious photos.
Painful lesson, but good info to prevent this all from happening,again.
WIth computers, having many copies and redundancies of data is key to never losing important computer data.
Again, sorry.

Error erasing drive.

been having problems with mac , forum suggest cloning drive to external and erasing original and then back. cloned using CCC ok but when i tried to erase mac HD last step caused error message " Disk Erase failed. disk Erase failed with the error: Could not unmount disk.
Has my life been saved by stopping me doing something i really shouldn't be doing or what?
Help on this much appreciated.

Well - been trying to reproduce this (and dumped a perfectly good 10.3.9 volume in the process, I might add!) - but a bit difficult with a different set-up. I'm sure you will understand that this is not something that I can easily check, but a 'reverse clone' has previously worked ok with 10.4.n...
Erasing removes the directory information, but leaves the data on the drive to be overwritten by the new info., in your case the clone from your external drive (eventually, hopefully).
As, presumably, you are going through this whole process to end up with a reliable and, in essence, "de-fragged" drive, you should consider writing zeros to the drive first(select 'Security Options'). This, whilst intended as a security measure, has the benefit, apparently, of creating a new temporary list of the bad bits of the drive that are not to be used, to add to the permanent list created originally by the drive manufacturer.
Presumably you have tried the 'Unmount' button at the top of the Disk Utility window.
The name you choose is the volume name that appears on the desktop and in DU, etc. and can be as cool, or cute, as required.
If partitioning into one volume works, you can always try erasing with zeros later. Good Luck.

Help I need to install new os x on my erase drive

I erased my macbookpro to install Mac os x and there is no restore cd that come with it but I got another and also download and it will stocked on s black screen with dash line and while connected to internet to download directly it won't go. Also in the utility disk the Mac os x I want to install while I check if I can install it from there but it being disabled. What can I do please help

Have you tried the disk utility to verify or repair the disk?
Here a link that can help you.
Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
If theres a problem with the drive, make an apointment with apple to have the drive replaced.
Good luck!

Erased Drive; How to Install?

I've just purchased a new iMac, and am sending this 1st gen iMac G5 to our daughter.
I erased the drive in preparation for shipment, and just now realized that she may have problems installing OS X Leopard on it. The iMac has a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Will she be able to install Leopard with these, or will she need to connect a wired keyboard/mouse for the installation?
(BTW, after I'd erased the drive, I had to eject the Leopard DVD via firmware, as the eject button on the keyboard didn't do anything).
Will she run into problems, or should I recommend that she carry it in to her Apple Store?
Thanks!

Wow!!! Talk about a quick reply!!!!
Thanks for the advice. It's already been shipped, so testing it isn't an option at this point (my bad!).
She's pretty excited about getting it, as she's been "limping" along on an old, processor-upgraded G4 for quite a while now. (I'd installed Leopard, and the processor upgrade made it VERY unstable. Unfortunately, it's a 3rd-hand computer, and the original owner can't remember where she got the processor upgrade. It's now running Tiger, and a lot of the iLife functions no longer work).
This computer, on its way to her, should be able to run just about everything except iMovie 08.
Thanks again!

Any way to get around Error 1309 without erasing drive data?

From what I understand this is an error that happens when you try to transfer files to a drive that is not formattted a certain way.
I am trying to transfer a project to this external LaCIe - media files also - and am getting the error. unfortunately I have nowhere else to transfer the data on the Lacie to back it and formatting would erase everything on it. I also don't know how to tell how it is formatted now.
This project needs to be moved because the Mac needs to go in for service. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks

Hmm. You know what? Looks like my other external Lacie (Drive#1) is formated Mac OSX extended. It's a smaller drive, 160 gig and pretty full, but maybe i could transfer that data over to the to Lacie 2, at least enough to free up project space.
This project has gone on and on, but there was an issue with the computer needing service and I'm concerned that waiting will put undue stress on it. I've been waiting for about two months, but it could be a few weeks more and I just want to get it looked at.
\If I move the data to a drive that is DOS formattted, does it only affect the size of files I can drag to it? Or will there be an issue with MAC files? It seems to have been working fine so far, no problems.

Update on Fragmentation Issue by Erasing Drive

I think I now have everything running correctly after fixing some hard drive privileges that got mixed up somehow during the clone, erase and clone back again process. I had to reinstall a couple of applications to get them back to normal. It was a big job but necessary to free up contiguous space which must have happened while running some large iMovie projects,
However, I notice that there is an application in the "Utility Folder" within the Application Folder named "Remote Install Mac OS X" which I never noticed before. Get Info calls it Version 1.1 and it only takes up 1.7 MB of space. It could have gotten there when I had to do an Archive & Install to get my hard drive back. This was before I discovered the contiguous space problem and had to erase the disk. Does anyone have this in their Utility Folder or know what it is? Thanks. Rich

I also have "Remote Install Mac OS X," though I hadn't noticed it.
It looks like it is a new utility installed by the recent Migration and DVD/CD Sharing Update. It apparently allows a MacBook Air to partner with your computer and use your DVD drive in order to boot the MacBook Air's OS X install DVD.
See
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3174
and
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2129
(Just what most of us need!)

Erasing drive

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