Help! Clean installing Mountain Lion over Mountain Lion!

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Hi there,
A few days ago I purchased and downloaded mountain lion. I intended to perform a clean install from a usb drive, but didn't have one to hand. Knowing I'd have to wait untill today to get hold of one, I decided to install ML normally in order to check it out before doing a clean install.

I think this may have been a mistake.

I have now put ML onto a usb drive successfully (it is recognised when I plug it in inside ML) but when I try and restart my macbook in order boot from it, it isn't recognised. I only have the option of booting from my local hdd or from ML's recovery partition.

Perhaps this has something to do with ML already being installed, and therefore it see's no reason to install it again? This is pure conjecture, I'm certainly not that knowledgable.

Any advice would be appreciated, I reall would like to do a clean install.

Thanks!
 

chscag

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If you used the Lion Disk Maker utility, it properly formatted the USB drive and made it bootable. Are you holding down your Option key and booting from the USB drive? That is what you need to do to install.

You'll see an option on the screen that says "EFI Boot" and an icon of the disk drive. Just select it and press enter. That will take you to the ML utilities screen where you can erase the drive and do a clean install. Let us know if that works for you.
 
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Yes, I am holding down the option key, and no, EFI boot doesn't appear as an option...
 

chscag

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Then, you did not properly make a Mountain Lion install USB disk. I used the "Lion Diskmaker 2rc2.app" with an 8 GB flash drive. It formatted the drive, installed Mountain Lion on it and made it bootable. I just tested it again after I wrote the last reply and it works well.

You can download the version I mentioned above from here. Try making the disk again.
 
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Why not just use the recovery partition to do a clean install? It's going to be the same either way.
 

chscag

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If he uses the Recovery Partition, he has to download ML again. And depending on his connection, he may not want to do that. The purpose in creating a bootable flash drive is to not have to re-download it from the App store each time.
 
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Ah, yeah. Forgot about the redownloading part.
 

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