Initial iMac setup

[BarkingGhost]

It has been 4.5 years since I did an initial iMac setup. At the time, OS X Lion (10.7.0) didn't require an app store sign-in to perform the initial, but last week on an in-store received refurbished mid-2015 iMac with El Capitan I was guided by the store monkey to log into the app store during initial setup.

As a result, the created user account in El Capitan is named after the real name on the AppleID account and the password is the AppleID password. I do not want this as this would be a grave secuirty risk in my opinion. So yesterday I rebooted and held down the Command+R to reinstall El Capitan but that made no difference as the reinstalled OS X still maintained the same user account.

Should I have used Disk utilities during the start of the reinstall to wipe the hard drive and create a new partition? I also noticed that the reinstallation routine 'verified' right-to-have of sorts between the hardware and the OS X I was trying to reinstall. I'm guessing it had a bound serial (on the CPU?) to the operating system.

If I cannot get this iMac to factory condition I will return it, but that still bothers me that I have no way to remove my personal information (re: AppleID credentials).

 

[Weaselboy]

Should I have used Disk utilities during the start of the reinstall to wipe the hard drive and create a new partition?

Yes... you need to command-r boot to recovery then use Disk Util to erase Macintosh HD, then reinstall to get a fresh start.

 

[BarkingGhost]

Well that was easy. Reinstalled after deleting and creating partition. Now I am going to experiment with cloning the internal drive using Carbon Copy Cloner to a USB3 based SSD and see how that goes.

If that works, I'll test further by installing Mozilla Thunderbird and then trying to reverse-clone back to the Internal drive. My only concern there is that CCC might accidentally overwrite the image file that is used for re-installation of the operating system.

 

[BarkingGhost]

I haven't tried reverse cloning yet, but the cloning item was successful and booting from an SSD+USB3 was surprisingly impressive compared to the internal HDD.