Wtf - No INSTALL DVD when you buy a MACPRO

Epic fail.

Just got home from setting up a friend's brand spanking new Mac Pro. He opted for a RAID controller (the official Apple RAID controller- came pre-installed in the machine), but wanted the four internal drives as RAID5 (shipped as JBOD).

Guess what?

You can't partition the RAID array when booted from the Recovery Partition, because you're booted from the RAID volume that you want to destroy. Despite being a BRAND NEW Mac Pro, it still didn't have internet recovery either- not that that would have made any difference, since you still need an external device to boot from when reconfiguring the RAID controller.

Talk about an epic failure... We had to drive back to my place (35 minutes!) then back to his place (55 minutes in traffic!) just to grab a flash drive with 10.8 (another 20 minutes to write that to the USB key) and my SL installation disks from 2010 just in case. Thanks for wasting a good portion of my day on absolutely nothing, Apple.

Only then, once we had a bunch of crap that DIDN'T come with his computer, could we actually recreate the damned RAID array and reinstall the operating system. I don't even know what to say, shipping professional towers without everything you need to set the thing up the way you want it.

-SC

ActionableMango said:

I'm won't defend Apple; I think a disc should be available.

However, new Macs have Internet recovery built into the firmware.

http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/

On a different note, if you are using a Mac Pro I assume you have valuable data. If your hard drive crashes and you don't have a backup, the OS is the least of your problems.

Click to expand...

All "new Macs" except Mac Pro.

Even with Internet Recovery on the new machines (Mac Pro not included), the install process takes a long time if you don't have high-speed service. This link from Macworld provides a way to make a bootable Mountain Lion install drive. Put it on a 8GB USB drive and you have a backup copy ready.