Newbie Questions - Installation

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Level 1

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Newbie Questions - Installation

All,

I am a very new to Mac but catch on quick. I have inherited 3 Xserves and one RAID. None of the boxes have CD/DVD drives to do a fresh installation. I have taken over the area from a past technician who had past away. No passwords were kept to be able to log into these systems.

Questions:

1. How can I install fresh copies of Mountain Lion on these systems without a hard drive?

2. how do I go forward to move the keys to my Apple ID?

Xserve, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 2, 2013 5:50 PM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Jul 2, 2013 7:23 PM in response to PsychTech

There are many aspects to your question, and no one single answer...

A major factor will be how they were installed in the first place - how did the previous admin setup the OS? What OS are they running? They didn't come with 10.8.x installed, so they must have had some other version.

If they're running 10.7 or 10.8 then you can boot off the recovery partition to reinstall/recover the OS. What you do depends on whether you care about the existing configuration/services they're running or whether you want to restart from scratch.

You should also be able to just reset the passwords via the recovery setup if that's all you need to do.

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Answer 2

PsychTech Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 2, 2013 7:30 PM in response to Camelot

How can I boot off the recovery partition to reinstall/recover the OS? I noticed that it did not have a "CD/DVD" to use the OSX installation CD if I wanted to reinstall the OS.

Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to find out how they were installed or what was on it. The data that is on the systems can be wiped and add a fresh installation.

Can you you provide the steps to do what you mentioned to do a recovery/reinstall and it would be nice to know the steps to reset the passwords just to review the data before I wipe the systems.

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Answer 3

Jul 5, 2013 6:47 AM in response to PsychTech

Hi PsychTech,

Sounds like you have an Xserve Cluster Node which doesn't come with a CD/DVD drive. How many drive bays does it have?

If it is then you'd be stuck to running 10.5 on it. Mountain Lion will only install on the 2009 Xserve which does have a DVD drive in the top right corner.

To be able to get into the servers you could do the following.. Find a copy of Tiger or Leopard on CD/DVD.. Either create a bootable image of it and start from a USB/Firewire Hard disk. When you boot up DO NOT go to install OS X but instead go to the Utilities menu and you'll find an option to reset the password which will at least get you in. You can do this with the client version or server version of OS X.

Hope that helps

Beatle

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