Reinstall Mountain Lion

Hey everyone,

I bought Mountain Lion a while ago from the App Store and installed it over Snow Leopard. Recently, I wanted to do a clean install but when I googled it I came to the conclusion that I needed an 8GB USB stick if I wanted to do a clean install with ML. I don't have that though so I thought I just go ahead and format my mac with the Snow Leopard CD and then install ML again from my app store account.

The problem is that I simply can't install any of the apps, including ML, from my app store account again.
I tried holding down the option key while clicking Purchase and also while clicking "Download" next to the ML app, but nothing happens. I find it also weird that next to all the apps it says "Install", but only next to the ML app it says "Download".

Is there another solution I can try?

Edit: I randomly clicked the download button a few times again (out of frustration) and suddenly the icon showed on my dock and it's actually downloading! That's really weird because I already did that a million times today... So I'm not really sure if that's the reason it finally started downloading. I still can't install any of the other apps though.

3rd Rock said:

If you ever did want a back up ML on a thumb drive, that's real easy, the below link will help you.

Click to expand...

Thank you!

benwiggy said:

Firstly: do you not have a backup of your entire disk before doing a clean install?

Second: Why do you want to do a clean install? There is most likely another way of achieving what you want.

I've installed every version of OS X from 10.3 onwards on top of my existing files, and migrated the data from 3 old Macs onto my current Mac.

Are there files that don't need to be there? Quite probably.
Does my Mac suffer as a result? No.

Click to expand...

Yes, I did back up everything before I formatted (I want to transfer all of my documents manually though). I don't have a particular reason to do a clean install, but I wanted a fresh start after having my Mac for 2,5 years.