Help Removing Yosemite OS X Installer on startup

[honeycombz]

Hello, I am running Mavericks and installed Yosemite onto another drive over USB and that was successful but now that drive is not connected and every time I restart it tries to boot into the Yosemite OS X Installer thing and I have to hold down option on restart to get my Mavericks drive. Is there a way to remove this?

 

[simonsi]

Go into Preferences / Startup Disk and set to what you need, further restarts will use that selected disk.

 

[honeycombz]

right, that makes it so it will boot into the proper drive but if I hold down option on restard I can still see the OS X Installer drive... how do I remove this? I've never noticed this before installing Yosemite onto a USB drive.

 

[simonsi]

right, that makes it so it will boot into the proper drive but if I hold down option on restard I can still see the OS X Installer drive... how do I remove this? I've never noticed this before installing Yosemite onto a USB drive.

If it is a mounted image, simply go into Disk Utility and unmount it.

If it is because you have a USB still connected with it on then eject it.

 

[honeycombz]

It's not mounted and it's not USB connected. Literally, if I restart now, and hold down option key there will be an OS X Installer drive showing up next to all my others and next to the recovery drive. WTF!

 

[simonsi]

It's not mounted and it's not USB connected. Literally, if I restart now, and hold down option key there will be an OS X Installer drive showing up next to all my others and next to the recovery drive. WTF!

Does Disk Utility see it?

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

I had the same problem during the public beta period. I couldn't figure out how to remove it, either. It looked like a "ghost" partition caused by the conversion to Core Storage. It may be a bug.

When I formatted my entire HD, it went away and didn't repopulate with the public version of Yosemite.

Others may be able to offer better tips on how to remove it, but sadly, I don't. All I can say is, I can relate, and had the same problem.

 

[honeycombz]

no, disk utility doesn't see it.

 

[simonsi]

no, disk utility doesn't see it.

In that case it is likely a Core Storage volume, only real gripe I have with Yosemite was that it converted the whole drive on which your installation partition is on to Core Storage - which DU can't then manage so your partitions are fixed and unchangeable.

As long as you haven't turned Filevault on you should be able to revert the Core Storage volumes to normal HFS, this thread should explain it:

Reverting Core Storage

Once reverted, you should be able to unmount and remove that unwanted installer.

 

[honeycombz]

i ran diskutil cs list in terminal and got No CoreStorage logical volume groups found

 

[simonsi]

Can you screenshot the Disk Util main panel showing the devices down the left side....must be somewhere.....?

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

Enable Debug Mode in Disk Utility. Open Terminal, type:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

Open Disk Utility. Click Debug on the menu bar, then checkmark "Show All Partitions." Report back.

 

[honeycombz]

hmmm.... i don't see it. I just see the EFI and the Recovery partition... i'm going to reboot to see if this just resolved itself on it's own and report back. pretty sweet about the debug menu. never knew about it. what on earth is 10,000 line first aid and Thousand Minute Countdown for?

 

[honeycombz]

Ok, here is the situation. I restarted, option key down... OS X Installer is still there... but I noticed it's drive in bay 3 which is not by normal boot volume... but was the volume I had the installer on when I was installing Yosemite over USB. That volume is running 10.6.8. SO... my boot volume is running 10.9.5 which is what I was running when I installed Yosemite from Drive 3 which has an old 10.6.8 build on it onto a USB Drive. The USB drive is not connected anymore and I've got the startup drive set to my mavericks volume and that is working fine but when I option boot the 10.6.8 drive is showing up as OS X Installer instead of the drive name and I've even zipped up the Yosemite Installer. Is there somewhere I can look on the 10.6.8 drive to see if there is some installer files somewhere else? I don't know how to boot into that drive seeing how it shows up as OS X Installer. Thoughts?

 

[honeycombz]

Well folks. The problem resolved itself. No clue what happened. Very bizarre.