Deleting Lion GM from external drive

[mathieuplante]

I recently installed Mac OS X Lion (Golden Master) on an external USB drive to try it out. I thought that the drive was empty, but I apparently installed it on a drive that had some files on it. This morning, when I bought Lion on the Mac Store and set everything up, I plugged the USB drive and saw that it had OS X files on it. I want to delete all traces of the GM from that drive so that there are no conflicts. I have already deleted these folders:

Applications
Library
System
Users

Do I have to do anything else to remove all traces of the GM?

Thanks.

 

[webjprgm]

You missed all the Unix hidden files, like /usr, /bin, /etc, /var, /private, etc. To get at those, the easiest way I know is to go to the Terminal. Easier would be to copy the files you want to keep, reformat the USB drive, then put the files back.

If you want to go the Terminal route, do this to see all the files on the drive:

cd /Volumes/YOUR_USB_DRIVE_NAME/
ls -la

Then delete the ones you don't want like this:

rm -rf usr
rm -rf var
rm -rf bin

... etc.

Be very careful with this, if you delete /usr (the slash means root file system that you booted from) then you destroy your currently running OS. You might need "sudo rm -rf usr" (sudo means super-user-do) if it gives you a permission denied error.

 

[mathieuplante]

You missed all the Unix hidden files, like /usr, /bin, /etc, /var, /private, etc. To get at those, the easiest way I know is to go to the Terminal. Easier would be to copy the files you want to keep, reformat the USB drive, then put the files back.

I will do exactly that, thanks for the tip, I appreciate it!

 

[murdercitydevil]

I don't understand why you don't just format the drive?

 

[mathieuplante]

I don't understand why you don't just format the drive?

Because I have important files on it. I will need to find some place to transfer those files to, then format and re-import. That's why I wanted to save some time if there was an easy way to delete the system files on it. But since I'm too much of a newbie with Terminal, I don't want to mess with it and risk losing those TBs of files.