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Given how useful recovery mode is in Mountain Lion, I recommend performing a clean install (with a good backup!) just so you can erase your Mac’s drive and restore it to a standard configuration that will allow the installer to create the Recovery HD partition. The first is if you’ve done some funky partitioning of your Mac’s startup drive that prevents the Mountain Lion installer from creating the special Recovery HD partition. There are, however, a couple situations in which you might consider a clean install.
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(Because Mountain Lion and Lion have so much code in common, upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion seems to entail even less risk than upgrading to from Snow Leopard.) Based on that experience, and similar reports from my Macworld colleagues, I feel comfortably saying that as long as you’ve properly prepared your Mac before installing Mountain Lion, you should be just fine installing directly over Lion or Snow Leopard. What about stuff the installer and Setup/Migration Assistant don’t catch? In my experience installing 10.8 many times over a variety of existing Lion, Snow Leopard, and even Leopard installations, I’ve had little trouble that I could trace directly to incompatibilities with transferred code, and upgrading to Mountain Lion has gone even more smoothly than the many Lion upgrades I performed last year. But the Snow Leopard installer and Setup/Migration Assistant were pretty good about not transferring over incompatible software, and Lion and Mountain Lion have been even better-in fact, Lion and Mountain Lion even automatically detect some incompatible programs and system add-ons the first time you log in, as explained in my main installation article. OK, so you can, but should you? Prior to Snow Leopard, I generally recommended a clean install. (This is one situation in which the more apps you’ve purchased through the Mac App Store, the better-you just launch the Mac App Store app and click a few buttons to automatically reinstall everything you’ve purchased.) Should you perform a clean install of Mountain Lion? If you truly want a clean start, you’ll instead need to manually copy your personal data from your backup to your new Mountain Lion installation, and then reinstall all of your software. Once you’ve done this, if you want to use Setup/Migration Assistant to restore data from your backup, proceed with Step 8. Specifically, scroll down to the section called “The brute-force method” and perform Steps 1 through 7, substituting “Snow Leopard” or “Lion” for “Leopard”-the result is a clean install.
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In fact, you can use the instructions in my article on how to install Mountain Lion over Leopard. So if you first back up your existing Snow Leopard or Lion installation and all your files-I recommend creating a bootable clone using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner-you can then boot from a bootable installer drive, erase your Mac’s normal startup drive, and install Mountain Lion on it. As explained in my main article on installing Mountain Lion, the installer will let you install the new OS onto a blank drive.
![better to clone drive or clean install mac os x better to clone drive or clean install mac os x](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/macos_hello.png)
Can you perform a clean install of Mountain Lion?įirst, the technical question: Given that the OS X 10.8 installer doesn’t include an official clean-install option, is it possible to perform such an installation? The simple answer is: Yes. As with Lion last year, many Mac users are asking two related questions: (1) Can you perform a clean install of Mountain Lion? and (2) Should you? Here’s my take on each of these questions.
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For most people, this is Mac's startup drive.But a new download-and-install procedure debuted with Lion (OS X 10.7) and continues with Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)-instead of a bootable installation DVD, you download the latest OS X installer to your Mac and install it from the same drive. Performing a clean install of OS X Mountain Lion erases all the data on the target disk. It contains a bootable system with utilities for performing basic disk repair, as well as the ability to reinstall the OS if necessary.
![better to clone drive or clean install mac os x better to clone drive or clean install mac os x](https://imgix-blog.setapp.com/high-sierra-10-13-4.png)
This is a hidden partition created by the Mountain Lion installer.
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650MB of free space for the Recovery HD partition.A minimum volume size of at least 60GB provides sufficient room for the OS, user data, apps, and some free space. You can squeeze Mountain Lion onto a smaller drive, but there won't be much space left for user data and applications. The target volume must be at least 8GB in size. You also need a Mac running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or later to access the Mac App Store. The OS X Mountain Lion minimum requirements guide lists the Macs that can run Mountain Lion, as well as recommendations beyond the minimum. Screen shot courtesy of Coyote Moon, Inc.