Resolved Reformat MacBook Air

Make a USB Lion drive by following the steps here:
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/08/apple-releases-utility-to-create-lion-recovery-usb-key/


Boot whilst holding down the Option key.

Perform a claen install

If you wish, format the drive first by entering disk utility from the screen that appears whilst holding down that key.


Then shut down, insert the USB stick boot whilst holding OPTION again and re-install Lion.....Remember....You need an internet connection to do this.

 

Be aware that doing this might remove your restore partition. That happened to me when I had to reformat my drive (because a Boot Camp installation was screwed up). Internet Restore still works, but having a restore partition makes things a little easier. There is a way to put the restore partition back, but I don't recall how to do that.

 

I just did this last night to my MBA2010. You don't even need the USB stick if you are not in a hurry. Lion will be brought down from the Internet as well.

 

It is called "erase".

In disc utility you get the option to do a quick erase, a 3 pass erase and a 7 pass erase.

 

When you reboot while holding down Command-R, you will get several options. One is Disk Utility. If you click on that, you will see the standard Disk Utility. It will show (at least it did on mine) your hard drive and the recovery partition. Only erase the HD partition not the recovery partition.

I have done this several times. On a 128 gig SSD, on a MBA2010, it takes about 2 - 3 hours, start to finish, with downloading everything from the Internet.

 

Can I ask why?

It worries me that people seem to have a need to completely reinstall the OS. That was a pain on Windows XP but it was easy to see why people did it. OS X doesn't have the same "registry bogging down" issues. I trust the reason for your reinstall(s) wasn't anything like that?

 

IIRC the recovery partition does not contain the installer either. It can boot your Mac and gets the stuff off Apple's servers.

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Is there any way to restore the restore partition? My understanding is you can only create the USB restore disk if your recovery partition is still working.

And what can you do if you go out and buy an entirely new HDD? And way to set up a brand new recovery partition?

 

If you screw up your installation it will allow you to nevertheless boot your Mac and reinstall.

 

In my case, I needed to reinstall OS X because I botched the re-installation of my Boot Camp partition. While Boot Camp itself works fine, don't try to use the Windows Setup repair tools to do a clean reinstall of Windows. It will overwrite the GUID table in the boot partition, which is what tells the Mac which partition to boot into first.

As for OS X, I have never had to reinstall it because it slowed down. However, before I sell an old Mac, I will usually "restore" it by reformatting it and reinstalling OS X.

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It makes re-installation a bit quicker since it doesn't have to download the entire OS (though it still needs Internet access to download some components).

 

Troubleshooting a software problem that's unrelated to the MBA or OSX.

 

Also, you don't have to worry about the 3 or 7 pass. Even on a normal hard drive those options are excessive for over 99% of the population. The only reason a person would do that is to make sure any slight variation in the magnetic charge of each bit wouldn't be detectable. SSD doesn't rely on magnetic charge for storage, so once you wipe it is wiped. There is no CSI type scenario where you could still read the data of a properly erased SSD.