How to perform a fresh DP4 install on a MBA 2010?

You install it normally on top of SL and then boot from the recovery partition, use its Disk Utility to wipe the drive and then reinstall Lion.

linkandzelda said:

I was wondering how I can do a fresh install of DP4 from within Snow Leopard, or rather I have SL on my machine right now. Just want to do a fresh install.

I don't have any means of a disc drive or anything to install with.
Thanks in advance,
Kris

Click to expand...

It's a bit of a pain at the moment but you can install Lion through Snow Leopard, then hold down the option key at boot and select to boot from the recovery partition. You then get a utilities menu and have an option to do a re-install of Lion.

I haven't gone through this yet myself but in theory you should be able to use Disk Utility from the Lion utilities menu to remove the main Snow Leopard partition before doing the re-install.

As I say I haven't tried myself yet - and I offer this advice with absolutely no guarantees that it'll work - and take no responsibilities for loss of data by deleting partitions, etc, etc...

Hellhammer said:

You install it normally on top of SL and then boot from the recovery partition, use its Disk Utility to wipe the drive and then reinstall Lion.

Click to expand...

Ah beat me to it!

Just a quick one though - surely you'd just remove the main partition and not wipe the whole drive? Wouldn't wiping the whole drive screw the recovery partition? Or have Apple sorted this / protected that partition within Disk Utility?

Bukey said:

Ah beat me to it!

Just a quick one though - surely you'd just remove the main partition and not wipe the whole drive? Wouldn't wiping the whole drive screw the recovery partition? Or have Apple sorted this / protected that partition within Disk Utility?

Click to expand...

I think it is protected because you can't wipe the partition you are currently booting from. Wiping the SL partition is enough though, no need to wipe the whole drive.

Question, kind of along the same lines, regarding my iMac.

If you wished to install Snow Leopard back onto your Mac after installing Lion on your internal drive, in preperation for the Mac App Store download in July, would I either:

a) Install SL onto an external drive, boot into that, insert my SL DVD and set that to the boot disc before resetting and using SL's Disk Utility to erase the Lion drive and then install SL fresh.

or ..

b) Insert my SL disc into my iMac while booted into Lion, go to Settings and set the SL disc as the boot drive, reset the iMac and run Disk Utility from the SL DVD before installing SL fresh.

I'm going home from work to install DP4 as my "main" OS due to it's stability and performance (I find it quicker than SL personally), but will want to go back to Snow Leopard for when Lion launches on the Mac App Store.

However, I don't want to waste time installing SL onto an external drive when I could just set the SL DVD as the boot drive from within Lion, reset and erase Lion using Disk Utility before reinstalling SL.

Hope that made sense, lol.

linkandzelda said:

EDIT2: never mind I will boot from my SL pen and install it again. Then I'll install Lion that's still the closest to a fresh install I guess xD. Any idea what impacts there would be going from a fresh install of Snow to Lion?

Click to expand...

This is what Apple are expecting Dev's to do now anyway - either upgrade, or do a fresh install and upgrade. It's what I've done - I've only got one Mac so am using DP4 on a spare swapped-out hard drive in my MBP.

Did a clean install of Snow Leopard, update OS to 10.6.7 and then did an upgrade to 10.7. Have my main install on my safely put aside HDD to switch back to for production / day-to-day until I'm happy to use Lion as my main OS.