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Questions + Any Detailed Tutorial on Clean Install Lion

R

rekhyt

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 20, 2008
1,127
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Part of the old MR guard.
Hi. Thanks for all who are reading this and thanks in advance to those who reply. :)

I've read online and saw that it appears to be impossible to install Lion on a clean/wiped/reformatted hard drive - is this true? I'd like to wipe my hard drive clean and then install Lion on it (new) and would prefer not to wipe and install Snow Leopard and upgrade to Lion.

Regarding the tutorials or detailed instructions on clean installing Lion - are there any that are (Most that I have searched online, including the one on Egg Freckles have been released before the actual release date on Lion, and since I'm not that up to date on everything in the Mac world recently) detailed, and I'd like to know if there is a comprehensive (new) tutorial regarding the clean installation of Lion?

Thanks again. :)
 
Good answer Rekhyt, but then again, how dare you ask for advice on a help forum?

Don't say anything even remotely derogatory about Apple either, they'll tear you to pieces on this forum.

Back to your question, Lion 10.7.1 has, shall we say, issues yet (if you disagree, just look at the forums). So, what I've done is reverted back to SL on my MBP but so as to run Lion, I've created a Lion DVD as per the instructions at Mashable and used an external USB hard drive for the Lion build. It's only 80Gb but it's good enough to do a clean build onto and test it out.

But I agree with your notion to do a completely clean build of Lion. Take it slowly at first, don't start to install all your old apps and or data straight away. At least when it starts acting stupid, you'll know it's not because of some legacy stuff that's not upgraded properly.

Dave
 
rekhyt,

I, too, would like to use Lion but I'm probably going to wait until the .2 or .3 build (and wait to hear that many more systems are running smoothly with Lion under these updates before making the transition). My wife and I are in the process of starting a new business and we cannot afford issues with my MacPro and my wife's iMac as our computers will be used for that purpose. In reading various forum posts on this subject, even doing a clean install could be a dicey situation as not all clean installs go smoothly.

It's a shame that this type of OS update has had so many issues. It just seems, historically, like the Apple user experience usually doesn't include these type of problems, or as many of these types of problems (I could be wrong on the historical aspect). I know that OS upgrades -- especially the .0 upgrade -- have their fair share of bugs but it seems that Lion just has an over abundance of issues. It almost seems like Apple should have waited a month or two to avoid the problems their customers are experiencing with this new Operating System. But, then again, many users have not had issues and their installs have run pretty smooth - clean install or just installing over Snow Leopard. Go figure.

This uncertainty from both pro-Lion and anti-Lion factions on these MacRumors Forums has made me (at least) double and triple guess myself if upgrading to Lion is the right thing to do at this time. Because so much is riding on my system acting "normal" and bug free, like it currently is on Snow Leopard on a day to day basis, I unfortunately cannot make the jump to Lion at the moment. Of course, sooner or later all the main bugs will be stomped out like all previous OS X versions have had their bugs fixed over time. I hope that this occurs sooner than later as OS X Lion looks like it's a very cool update to OS X. I have no doubt Lion will run as smoothly as Snow Leopard is running now. It's just going to take some time, I suppose.

Please keep this thread updated of your (hopeful) success in doing a clean install as I'd like to hear how it went for you.
 
The easiest way is this:

http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us/

Use this tiny app and create your bootable USB flash drive (you can use 4 GB stick with this app, if you do manually you'll need a 8 GB one).

After you created your installation media, restart your computer and hold option button. Select "Install Mac Os X" (or something like that). After computer boots, select disk utility and wipe your HD, then install lion.

It's really an easy process in my opinion. I haven't installed it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is the easiest way.
 
jeffreyk said:
...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to play it safe and do a Time Machine backup, as well as having a CCC bootable backup in case I want to migrate anything to the new installation if I like Lion.

ufkdo said:
The easiest way is this:

http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us/

Use this tiny app and create your bootable USB flash drive (you can use 4 GB stick with this app, if you do manually you'll need a 8 GB one).

After you created your installation media, restart your computer and hold option button. Select "Install Mac Os X" (or something like that). After computer boots, select disk utility and wipe your HD, then install lion.

It's really an easy process in my opinion. I haven't installed it yet, but I'm pretty sure this is the easiest way.
Click to expand...

Ah alright - thanks. I thought that, apparently, Lion is upgrade-only and requires Snow Leopard on the disk in order to install. Is this true?
 
rekhyt said:
Ah alright - thanks. I thought that, apparently, Lion is upgrade-only and requires Snow Leopard on the disk in order to install. Is this true?
Click to expand...

Apple made us think that way, just like they did with Snow Leopard disk (they said that the disk is upgrade disk but doing a clean install was easy). If you create your installation media, you can wipe your HD and clean install Lion, so you don't need SL installed (of course you need SL to download Lion)

I found this video on youtube, he explains all you need to do. So I hope it helps :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn9b-QLs_0k
 
ufkdo said:
Apple made us think that way, just like they did with Snow Leopard disk (they said that the disk is upgrade disk but doing a clean install was easy). If you create your installation media, you can wipe your HD and clean install Lion, so you don't need SL installed (of course you need SL to download Lion)

I found this video on youtube, he explains all you need to do. So I hope it helps :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn9b-QLs_0k
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

It seems pretty unbelievable that Lion can be installed with a 4GB installer though.
 
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