Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Brocksley

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 5, 2013
59
11
Utah
I was going to do a clean install of el cap on my new MacBook, but when I boot to Internet Recovery, it shows Yosemite. Is there a way to do a clean install without a USB?
 

tom vilsack

macrumors 68000
Nov 20, 2010
1,880
63
ladner cdn
I was going to do a clean install of el cap on my new MacBook, but when I boot to Internet Recovery, it shows Yosemite. Is there a way to do a clean install without a USB?

-partition drive in yosemite,download el capitan,when installing point it to new drive,boot into el capitan partition, use carbon copy or super duper to image el capitan to first partition (where you have yosemite),boot into first partition and delete second partition and make drive whole again....thoughts?
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,482
16,197
California
Is there a way to do a clean install without a USB?

Yes... you could DL an install El Capitan overtop of Yosemite as an upgrade install. That would then give you a El Capitan recovery partition. Then command-r boot to the El Capitan recovery partition and use Disk Utility to erase the drive then reinstall the OS. That will give you a clean install of El Capitan.

The only issue is you end up downloading El Capitan twice.
 

smithrh

macrumors 68030
Feb 28, 2009
2,746
1,791
-partition drive in yosemite,download el capitan,when installing point it to new drive,boot into el capitan partition, use carbon copy or super duper to image el capitan to first partition (where you have yosemite),boot into first partition and delete second partition and make drive whole again....thoughts?

Be very very careful with partitioning disks in El Cap - not only is the interface in El Cap really poor, I've already lost 10G to an un-addressable partition.

Until I ran into this, I thought going the 2-partition route was golden, now I'm regretting it.
 

tom vilsack

macrumors 68000
Nov 20, 2010
1,880
63
ladner cdn
Be very very careful with partitioning disks in El Cap - not only is the interface in El Cap really poor, I've already lost 10G to an un-addressable partition.

Until I ran into this, I thought going the 2-partition route was golden, now I'm regretting it.

That's strange...I tried the new partition interface and made a second partition,...then removed it and made drive as one again and found no loss of space at all. (note... my original el capitan install was clean using usb stick,but can't really see that being a issue via partitioning and your loss of space...
 

unplugme71

macrumors 68030
May 20, 2011
2,827
754
Earth
Never had an issue running the command via CLI. For whatever reason, El Cap won't appear when trying to boot from USB. My Mavericks or Yosemite USB sticks work fine. I even tried another USB stick. It just won't appear for me to click the installer.

Any thoughts?
 

cptomes

macrumors newbie
Jan 6, 2015
8
0
Steve just as easy to run this command from Terminal...

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app --nointeraction


I've been doing this since Mavericks. Works great.
 

tedson

macrumors 6502
Jul 17, 2002
262
190
I was going to do a clean install of el cap on my new MacBook, but when I boot to Internet Recovery, it shows Yosemite. Is there a way to do a clean install without a USB?
don't feel too bad, when I do Internet recovery, it installs Lion.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.