Mountain Lion Clean Install.

[Adamantoise]

Finally bought my 15.4" Macbook Pro ... Have a blank SSD and would like to put mountain lion on it.

I have searched the internet but all I see are guides for people that 'bought' the upgrade and thus have access to mountain lion as a download in the App Store.

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[plasticphyte]

Get an 8GB or larger flash drive or external USB drive, ensure there is nothing valuable on it, and that it has been formatted with the Mac OS file system. You will also need to have the computer connected to the Internet.

If you haven't already accepted the iLife apps into your iTunes account, do this first, otherwise you won't have them available for installation after you install the OS on your new drive. Google will help you figure out how to do this.

With your old hard drive in the laptop, boot into the recovery partition by holding the ALT key down, then selecting the recovery partition option.

When you have booted into the recovery environment, select the appropriate language.

At this point you should have an option to reinstall Mac OS, choose it, and when asked where to install it to, choose the external drive.
The process will download the Mountain Lion installer to the external drive - it is usually the version of the OS that shipped with your computer.

It will reboot when it is done, this is the point you need to remove the external drive from your Mac.

From there you can follow the any guides online that walk you through creating a Mac OS installer USB stick.

 

[Adamantoise]

Thank you so much!

 

[Orlandoech]

• OS X: About OS X Recovery
• Apple - OS X Recovery restores your Mac with a few clicks.
• Hands on with Mountain Lion's OS X Recovery and Internet Recovery | Macworld
• OS X Mountain Lion USB installation drive
  

 

[Adamantoise]

• OS X: About OS X Recovery
• Apple - OS X Recovery restores your Mac with a few clicks.
• Hands on with Mountain Lion's OS X Recovery and Internet Recovery | Macworld
• OS X Mountain Lion USB installation drive
  

Thanks! It's just that most of those guides were made for people who bought the Mountain Lion upgrade from the App Store and had access to the .dmg ... My computer came preinstalled with Mountain Lion, I had no idea about the Internet recovery option.

 

[Orlandoech]

Thanks! It's just that most of those guides were made for people who bought the Mountain Lion upgrade from the App Store and had access to the .dmg ... My computer came preinstalled with Mountain Lion, I had no idea about the Internet recovery option.

Yea, you will need to use the internet recovery

• Hands on with Mountain Lion's OS X Recovery and Internet Recovery
• What is OS X Lion Internet Recovery and how does it work?

 

[Adamantoise]

Get an 8GB or larger flash drive or external USB drive, ensure there is nothing valuable on it, and that it has been formatted with the Mac OS file system. You will also need to have the computer connected to the Internet.

If you haven't already accepted the iLife apps into your iTunes account, do this first, otherwise you won't have them available for installation after you install the OS on your new drive. Google will help you figure out how to do this.

With your old hard drive in the laptop, boot into the recovery partition by holding the ALT key down, then selecting the recovery partition option.

When you have booted into the recovery environment, select the appropriate language.

At this point you should have an option to reinstall Mac OS, choose it, and when asked where to install it to, choose the external drive.
The process will download the Mountain Lion installer to the external drive - it is usually the version of the OS that shipped with your computer.

It will reboot when it is done, this is the point you need to remove the external drive from your Mac.

From there you can follow the any guides online that walk you through creating a Mac OS installer USB stick.

So let me get this straight ... Pretty much all this does is installs Mountain Lion onto the SD card and then from there I have to do the whole internet recovery thing again on the SSD?

Because I followed your instructions and right now I have an SD card that can boot Mountain Lion (not the installer, Mountain Lion is installed on the SD card itself, I can run Mountain Lion from the SD card, it even has it's own little recovery partition on the SD card).

So there's really no way to just get a raw install disc? I have to remove the HDD, put in the SSD and use the recovery partition on the SD card to install Mountain Lion (via internet recovery @_@)?

 

[T5BRICK]

So there's really no way to just get a raw install disc? I have to remove the HDD, put in the SSD and use the recovery partition on the SD card to install Mountain Lion (via internet recovery @_@)?

Is there a reason you can't just use Internet recovery?

 

[Adamantoise]

Is there a reason you can't just use Internet recovery?

Well, I'm lagging on League of Legends since I'm playing while it's doing its thing.

Guess I'll just wait it out.

 

[T5BRICK]

Well, I'm lagging on League of Legends since I'm playing while it's doing its thing.

Guess I'll just wait it out.

Oh. Yeah, the fact that you have to download 4GB every time you want to reinstall the OS is kind of annoying.

 

[minifridge1138]

Yes, I hate that the Installer is really a downloader.

If you already have Lion installed, you could clone that partition onto your SSD.

 

[plasticphyte]

My apologies for not replying earlier, I don't visit the forums here very often any more.

Firstly, I'm bolding part of my original post, it seems you may have missed this step, resulting in a copy of Mac OS X being installed on the SD card, and I didn't clarify that failing to remove the card/USB stick/drive would end up with the installation process proceeding on the stick/drive.

You will need to repeat the process to get the InstallESD.dmg file needed to create a bootable USB installer.

...
At this point you should have an option to reinstall Mac OS, choose it, and when asked where to install it to, choose the external drive.
The process will download the Mountain Lion installer to the external drive - it is usually the version of the OS that shipped with your computer.

It will reboot when it is done, this is the point you need to remove the external drive from your Mac.

...

So let me get this straight ... Pretty much all this does is installs Mountain Lion onto the SD card and then from there I have to do the whole internet recovery thing again on the SSD?

Because I followed your instructions and right now I have an SD card that can boot Mountain Lion (not the installer, Mountain Lion is installed on the SD card itself, I can run Mountain Lion from the SD card, it even has it's own little recovery partition on the SD card).

So there's really no way to just get a raw install disc? I have to remove the HDD, put in the SSD and use the recovery partition on the SD card to install Mountain Lion (via internet recovery @_@)?

 

[duervo]

Finally bought my 15.4" Macbook Pro ... Have a blank SSD and would like to put mountain lion on it.

I have searched the internet but all I see are guides for people that 'bought' the upgrade and thus have access to mountain lion as a download in the App Store.

Any help will be appreciated.

Just adding my nod to using Internet Recovery. It worked fine for me a couple weeks ago when I replaced the stock mechanical drive in my new mid2012 MBP 13" with an SSD.

Pretty painless ... Just need to be aware that it will take a while because it's downloading a lot of data over your Internet connection. Start it, then check on it every few minutes to see how it's doing.