I am about to clean install Mavericks on my iMac, but there's one thing I'm worried about. I don't have an 8gb flash drive, or external SSD of any sort. Can I use a 1TB hard drive sitting under my desk? Would I need to remove all files from it except the installer?
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Clean install drive
- Thread starter Supernerd
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If you dont have a 8GB USB, you could technically use a 1TB drive. As far as I remember creating a bootable installer would require you to wipe the drive. There might be a way for you to "split" the drive into 2 partitions, you can do some googling. You can also do the following, upgrade to mavericks using the normal upgrade procedure. Once you finished upgrading, you can do a clean install from the recovery drive. Sure this will take a lot longer, but will get you the same result. Personally I upgraded all my macs, and have not seen a performance drop. Many other mac users are reporting similar things, so I doubt there is much to be gained by doing a clean install.
I would install normally if I weren't upgrading from Snow Leopard. Yeah, I skipped the last two cats.
I like the partition method. It's uncomplicated and takes a lot shorter than removing and re-adding 200gb of data currently stored there.
I like the partition method. It's uncomplicated and takes a lot shorter than removing and re-adding 200gb of data currently stored there.