4Gig Flashdrive Enough?

[markmilly]

Hello all,

I have a MBP with OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and am currently looking to finally upgrade to Mountain Lion. I am wanting to do a fresh install and will be following the guide posted in this forum however, is a 4 gig flash drive enough to store the Mountain Lion dmg from the app store? Lifehacker says that you need at least 8 gigs to install a bootable Mountain Lion copy on a flashdrive but this guide says 4 gigs will do just fine.

So, will a 4gig flashdrive be enough to store a bootable Mountain Lion?

Thanks,
markmilly

 

[rctlr]

I used an 8gb

 

[switon]

RE: ML install drive...4.38GB...

Hello all,

I have a MBP with OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and am currently looking to finally upgrade to Mountain Lion. I am wanting to do a fresh install and will be following the guide posted in this forum however, is a 4 gig flash drive enough to store the Mountain Lion dmg from the app store? Lifehacker says that you need at least 8 gigs to install a bootable Mountain Lion copy on a flashdrive but this guide says 4 gigs will do just fine.

So, will a 4gig flashdrive be enough to store a bootable Mountain Lion?

Thanks,
markmilly

Hi markmilly,

I used exactly 4.38GB on my ML USB install drive, so I believe that a 4GB drive will not quite be large enough. Sorry.

Switon

 

[mwhities]

4G flash drive will not work. I grabbed the wrong USB when I was going to reinstall and it said it wasn't enough space.

You will need to get the 8G.

 

[markmilly]

Alright, thanks for the quick responses guys!

Looks like I'll be buying a larger drive :/

 

[switon]

RE: using an 8GB drive...

Hi markmilly,

What I did was use a 32GB drive that I then partitioned into two partitions, one 5GB partition for the ML install drive and one 27GB partition that I use to store other utilities and tools that I find useful when booting off of the USB flash drive.

...just a suggestion on what to use with that extra 3GB on your ML install drive...

Switon

 

[benwiggy]

There is very little need to do a fresh install. The OS X installer is designed to replace an existing OS by default. With my old 2006 iMac, I installed Leopard over Tiger, Snow Leopard over Leopard, and Lion over Snow Leopard, without any problems.

If you are just going to install the OS just on one Mac, then you don't need a flash drive at all. Just run the installer app.
Once ML is installed, you will have a Restore Partition on your hard drive, which you can use to wipe the rest of your disk and reinstall, if you need to at some later date.
However, the need to reinstall OS X is very slight. Most problems are to do with issues in the user account (prefs, caches), or third-party software.

I've only needed to reinstall OS X once, possibly twice, in 10 years, using several different Macs and OS versions.