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dunning

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
5
0
Not sure if I should put this in the OS X Mountain Lion forum or this one, but here goes.
I purchased my new 2012 13' MacBook Air recently. It came from the factory with Lion installed on it. I qualified for the for the free upgrade to Mountain Lion update. I have since installed Mountain Lion on the machine using the clean install instructions found all over the net. Its working great, I just have a question. If I decide that I want to do a clean install in 6 or 8 or 12 months, would I be able to use the Internet Recovery option to do the install and get the latest version of Mountain Lion? Or will using the Internet Recovery Option result in getting Lion, since that was the OS that originally shipped with the machine? Also, if a future Internet Recovery option clean install does result in getting Mountain Lion installed on the machine, would I get the latest version of Mountain Lion (i.e. 10.8.7) or what ever Apple has released at that time?
 

NeonBible

macrumors member
Jun 26, 2012
87
1
Not sure if I should put this in the OS X Mountain Lion forum or this one, but here goes.
I purchased my new 2012 13' MacBook Air recently. It came from the factory with Lion installed on it. I qualified for the for the free upgrade to Mountain Lion update. I have since installed Mountain Lion on the machine using the clean install instructions found all over the net. Its working great, I just have a question. If I decide that I want to do a clean install in 6 or 8 or 12 months, would I be able to use the Internet Recovery option to do the install and get the latest version of Mountain Lion? Or will using the Internet Recovery Option result in getting Lion, since that was the OS that originally shipped with the machine? Also, if a future Internet Recovery option clean install does result in getting Mountain Lion installed on the machine, would I get the latest version of Mountain Lion (i.e. 10.8.7) or what ever Apple has released at that time?
Yes, once you have installed Mountain Lion, the Internet Recovery will install the OS you already have installed – Lion if you have Lion installed; Mountain Lion if you have Mountain Lion installed. And as far as I know, the Internet Recovery installs the x.0 version and you have to manually install the later updates. But this was with Lion, though. Maybe it has changed due to the fact that the system updates have moved to the Mac App Store(?).
 

dunning

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
5
0
It would be nice if it would install an updated version ML from the internet recovery option. I'll have to try it sometime.
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,071
15,492
California
It would be nice if it would install an updated version ML from the internet recovery option. I'll have to try it sometime.

There is a little confusion here.

When you boot to recovery with a command-r, your machine checks the drive for a Recovery HD partition. In your case now that would be a Mountain Lion Recovery HD, and you would be prompted for your AppleID and Mountain Lion would be downloaded and installed. In the past with Lion this version was updated along with versions, so just after 10.7.4 cam out for example the App Store version was also updated to 10.7.4. We can assume this will happen with Mountain Lion.

Now scenario two. You do a command-r recovery boot and your system detects no or a busted Recovery HD. Now your system will divert to a boot from firmware (EFI) and Internet Recovery mode. That mechanism will give you Lion since that is what your machine's serial number is tied too, not Mountain Lion. You would need to install Lion, then use the App Store in Lion to get Mountain Lion back.

Presumably once new Macs start coming with Mountain Lion preinstalled a Internet Recovery WOULD yield a Mountain Lion install as those serial numbers would be linked to Mountain Lion.

You can read more about it here.
 
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