Reinstalling OS X?

peznut said:

Hey there!
Recently purchased my first mac - a MacBook Air. Really liking it so far, still getting used to it, but enjoying it.

Obviously the Air has no CD drive - how do you reinstall OSX if required? Should I be making a backup of some sort? I see no recovery drive type of set up like I'm used to with recent Windows laptops.

I'm looking at installing the OSX 10.9 Mavericks beta, so looking at how to go backwards if required.

Thanks for your help!

Click to expand...

At boot up before you see the Apple, hold Option(Alt). You should see 2 drives pop up, Macintosh HD and Recovery HD. Also if you hold Command+R instead of Option it should take you to Internet Recovery.

If you want to try out Mavericks you will need to build a flash drive installer or back up your current install, or use OS X Recovery Assistant to build a flash drive Recovery, because installing Mavericks will destroy the Mountain Lion Recovery partition.