Clean Install of Yosemite...a little help

[p_rod]

I have two Macs, a late 2009 0r 2010 iMac running Snow Leopard (quite well) and a 2011 late year MacBook Air currently running Mav 10.9.5. The iMac is maxed out with 16Gigs RAM and the Macbook has it's built in limited 4 Gigs memory. Both machines have plenty of room on each drive (both less than half full).

I have been searching for a tutorial on how to perform a clean install of Yosemite on each of these machines but have yet to find one.

I don't want any of the gurus here to burn the time to write it all out for me...I am sure it has been done before and is on this site somewhere but I just cannot find it. If you could just point me in the right direction (it does have to be a COMPLETE tutorial).

I did do a clean install of the Mav OS when it came out, with a lot of suggestions from some here, but only doing it once the procedure was not 'burned into' my somewhat limited memory banks I don't want to make a mistake...especially on the Snow Leopard-loaded iMac.

I will perform complete backups (on more than one media) and will also use CCC on each machine prior to the clean install.

Thank you very much, in advance, as usual!

Cheers!

Pat

PS--and if someone has a trick or two on how to perform more accurate searches for data on this site without using the built in search engine, I'll be open for that too.

 

[harryb2448]

Firt backup both machines to an external drive, preferably a drive per machine or if must be a drive with two partitions marked iMac and MBA. Download Yosemite again, and do not run. Download LionDiskMaker, and with an 8GB USB thumb drive connected, run the Diskamker program. It will automatically format the thumb drive and install Yosemite on it as a bootable driver.


http://liondiskmaker.com


After backing up, pop the thumb drive into the USB slot, reboot and hold down 'C' after the chime. Leave Installer and go to Utilities > Disk Utility and format the internal drive Mac OS X Extended (Journalled), back to the Installer and run. Enter network and other information and use Softeare Update to bring everything up to speed. Hook up the esternal drive with the backup, and in utilities use Migration Assistant to copy everything over.

Be aware that sometimes MS Office and Adobe programs will not migrate well, and may ask for the activation code, or a clean install. Also Snow Leopard was the last operating system to have Rosetta which enables older PowerPC applications to be installed. So older apps such as Office 2004 will not run.

 

[p_rod]

Harry!

Thank you very much for the reply and the directions to perform a clean install. You were one that chipped in on my last clean install and it went flawlessly.

And thank you for the caution about MS Office. I do have that installed on my iMac (I believe it is MS Office 11 for Macs), but it was a downloaded program so I have no install disks. (My wife works for the number 1 'user' of Microsoft software on the planet and they offer MS Office to them/relatives for the paltry sum of $9.95 but it's just simply downloaded from MS without any discs). Hopefully that program will survive the upgrade to Yosemite.

I think I'll do the MacBook Air first to check out Yosemite...then consider updating the iMac. The big Mac is basically used for occasional MS Office work but mainly for editing photos and videos so having the "latest, greatest" OS in it is not as important as it is on the MBA. It runs so well with no issues I am not convinced that updating it is truly necessary at this time.

I may just have to replace the iMac here later this year..... even though I have maxed out the RAM for it (16 Gigs) it does occasionally 'choke' on some of the videos I edit on it, especially when shot in 1080 rez. It does better with the 720 Rez and I haven't even tried the newer 4K rez yet...for that I'll probably need a machine with a lot more powerful processor and gobs or RAM.

Again, I tip my hat to you for your help!

Cheers!

Pat

 

[harryb2448]

My pleasure Pat. With Office 2015 coming soon, can you 'adopt' me as a family member for that $9.95 lol?

 

[p_rod]

Consider yourself adopted!

If that same deal is still available to her when the new stuff comes out, I cannot see why she couldn't share it with her 'son' that happens to live in OZ!

I'll let you know, Harry.....and again, thanks for all your help!!!

Cheers, mate!

Pat

 

[harryb2448]

No it was a jest Pat. That would be very wrong.

Your wife would not want to be adopting a 76 year old!

 

[p_rod]

LOL, Harry.

76? Heck, where we come from you're just a kid!

Cheers!

Pat

 

[p_rod]

Good morning to you, Harry! (I know it's just shy of 0600 Wed AM (at least on the OZ east coast) and it's just shy of 1400 US east coast here.....

I did as you said, downloaded Diskmaker X and then proceeded to download Yosemite and whilst I was waiting, decided to read some more of the reviews on the Apple Store site. Hmmm, not too good. From over 4,000 submissions, just a hair less than 50% gave Yo a one star rating. One star.

I know that it's so much easier to be negative...and some of the negative reviews were definitely from anti-Apple folks.... but yet many of the 5 star reviews were from the 'lemming' crowd too that are convinced anything Apple is so superior to anything else out there and blindly take everything from Cupertino as true gospel...and that, to be honest, isn't always 100% true either. So I discarded the posts from the lunatic fringes on both ends and decided not to pull the trigger yet on installing Yosemite.

Mavericks is running just fine on my late 2011 MBA (and since I have a paltry 4 gigs of RAM (that to my knowledge cannot be upgraded???) and posts just done last night in the App store still indicate several WI-FI issues that Apple is grappling with I think I'll just stick to Mavs now on the little MBA and definitely stick with Mountain Lion on the big Mac upstairs.

I just DC'd my download from the App store.....at the rate my data is coming in it will be over 10 hours before the download is complete. Either they are very covered up right now with downloads or something...... I know with earlier downloads from other sites today I was maxing out around 24 mb/sec so the problem is not here.

Anyway, I have Diskmaker downloaded and ready to go and until download times become a little more realistic from the store, and that I decide I really, really need to upgrade I am pulling the plug on Yosemite, for now.

But I will keep you posted if and when I decide to give this upgrading to Yo another go. ;D

And thanks for all the help!

Cheers!

Pat

 

[MacInWin]

I'm neither a lemming nor a lunatic fringe Apple hater. Yosemite works well for me. There are things that broke (my printer driver, for example, and a third party program that provides TRIM for my SSD that Apple doesn't) but overall, Yosemite was a good upgrade for me. My observation of folks who comment at Apple sites is that the negative folks show up to complain, but those who are happy don't because they have no reason to do so. So the great exaggeration of the negative. Anybody who gave Yosemite 1 star is just wrong. It's not perfect, but it does run well for the most part. At $0, I'd say it was a bargain.

 

[chscag]

@p_rod:

I guess I've been lucky, the only OS X upgrade that gave me fits was when I went from Leopard to Snow Leopard and I solved that by installing clean. Don't let yourself fall too far behind in OS X upgrades, with Apple it pays to stay in step. With Windows, you can still run XP and get along, Apple is not like that.

If you have a good backup strategy (Time Machine and CCC) then upgrading should be a snap. If something goes blooey you can always revert back without any fuss. ;D

BTW, love your "Blackbird". I had the privilege of meeting the pilot of one when I was stationed at Nellis AFB, Nevada. We were allowed out on the flight line to watch him take off. If you've ever seen one take off, you'll never forget it!

 

[p_rod]

Jake:

I thought I was being very careful not to call anyone on THIS forum anything, left or right lunatic fringe. I was just expressing to Harry what the sentiments were on the App Store site.

After reading probably a hundred reviews, that's what I based that comment on.
But I'll stand by what I said. ;D




And to chscag:

Yes, the SR-71..... Oh, I've seen them fly before, probably from a perspective only a handful have ever seen too. Don't need any MIB on my front porch tonight.

And yes, I do have a good backup stategy, learned here, mostly from Harry and you in posts oh so long ago.

I did a Time Machine Backup this morning followed by a CCC backup on a separate SSD just before attempting to download Yosemite, so everything on this machine is safely archived.

That being said, I've decided that I should probably just go ahead and proceed, so that's what the project for this evening is going to involve. Now if I can just get a better connection to the App Store!

Thank you for the input, chscag, and for convincing me to forge ahead.

Cheers!

Pat

 

[MacInWin]

Pat, I know you didn't target anybody here, I was just commenting that I am on neither fringe, that Yosemite works relatively well for me, but it's not perfect. But in general, bad news gets the biggest publicity, success not so much.

 

[MacInWin]

Oh, btw, I heard what must have been a blackbird on the air one day. Over Pensacola Fl, he checked into the ATC and reported he was "above Flight Level 600." The controller asked him for his altitude again, he again said "above FL600." The controller insisted again, at which point the BB said, "Trust me, there's nobody but us up here." He crossed the controller sector in about 5 minutes, so he was hauling it as well.

 

[harryb2448]

Pat I have used Yosemite since Public Beta Rellease 1. Only one minor hiccup with Brelease 2, which was corrected in release 3, and all to 6 were good and not one problem with the full version now uo to 10.10.1. I often think a lot of the negative OS threads are posted by non-Mac users.

Any problems with Yosemite have probably been carried forward from the last OS.