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Lion Clean Install

I already have lion installed and would like to do a clean install so I can start over. If I have a bootable clone can I boot to that hardrives Lion Recovery to perform the clean install so I dont have to burn a copy of Lion onto a DVD?

Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jan 24, 2012 8:42 AM

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7 replies

Jan 24, 2012 9:13 AM in response to drewpreiner

Unless you're going to restore the bootable clone you have to your internal drive (Macintosh HD), then you can just reboot your system and press COMMAND-R at the boot chime to enter the Recovery HD and perform Disk Utiliites to wipe the Macintosh HD and reinstall Lion from the Recovery HD. This will redownload Lion and install it if you click 'Continue'.

Jan 24, 2012 9:49 AM in response to drewpreiner

drewpreiner wrote:


What do you mean? What happens after I hit erase? If I erase the drive, will I not be able to use Lion Recovery cause I will have erased it?


Sorry for any confusion.


If you boot into the Recovery HD (Command-R) and erase your Macintosh HD, you'll be fine and you'll be able to select the Reinstall OS X option after the erase and after you exit Disk Utilities.

Jan 24, 2012 11:08 AM in response to drewpreiner

I don't want to make any assumptions since I don't know how your system is setup and how you tried to reinstall.


Do you have Bootcamp setup?

Do you have FileVault2 enabled?

Are you using RAID?

What did you boot from to reinstall Lion? Did you use Command-R? Did you boot from your clone? Did you boot from a Lion Recovery Disk?


See if anything in this link provides answers.


Please provide step by step how you performed the erase and reinstall.


I have always used a USB thumb drive I created from the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant or one that I created with the Lion installer (InstallESD.dmg) restored to it to boot from. From there, I used Disk Utilities to erase the Macintosh HD and redownload/reinstall Lion.

Lion Clean Install

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