Installing Mavericks. Question about disk2 and disk3.

[thiagos]

I am doing a clean install of Mavericks. When formatting the hard drive under disk utilities (booted the computers, held ALT and selected the flash drive), I see disk2 (OS X Install ESD) and disk3 (OS X Base System). I have tried delete both partitions through terminal prior to starting the drive format and it would not allow me to delete it.

I know Mountain Lion had a separate hidden partition of the OS on your drive but Mavericks seems to have two. Is there a way to delete those two partitions and/or is it normal that Mavericks requires those two hidden partitions to fully operate? I just want to make sure I don't have both Mountain Lion's and Mavericks restore partitions taking space on my drive.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bear]

...
I see disk2 (OS X Install ESD) and disk3 (OS X Base System).
...

Are you sure those partitions weren't on your flash drive?

 

[thiagos]

I tried removing the flash drive but I get the beach ball and disk utility freezes. So I guess it might be on the flash drive.

 

[Weaselboy]

I tried removing the flash drive but I get the beach ball and disk utility freezes. So I guess it might be on the flash drive.

Those are definitely on the flash drive.

 

[thiagos]

Thanks. I appreciate that you took your time to answer.

 

[tgd85]

I've had a similar experience. I did a clean install over the weekend using a newly created DIY fusion drive with an SSD and HDD. Both drives were formatted and repartitioned.

It looks like Mavericks created 3 partitions on each drive: (1) EFI (2) usable partition (3) Boot OSX. The size of these partitions differ between drives.

The Boot OSX partition on the SSD drive is ~250 mbs, while the HDD also has a Boot OSX partition but is ~650 mbs.