As an opening blog post I wanted to highlight how easy, and yet pointless, a clean install of Mavericks is. Here’s the approach I took:
- Make a bootable Mavericks installer on a USB stick, one example of how is here
- Find yourself a drive big enough to contain everything on your current Mac
- Erase and reformat the drive, give it a single partition with journalling
- Get a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, and copy your entire drive to the external unit, making a bootable copy
- Wait quite some time
- Reboot your Mac and check the external drive is bootable and working well (hold down Option when you boot up to choose the external drive)
- Run Disk Assistant
- Assuming you are confident, erase your Mac HD – scary
- Reboot again, but this time boot using the USB stick you made in step 1
- Install Mavericks – wait quite a while
- Reboot your fresh Mac and use Software Update to catch up with any new releases
- Phase 1 is done – your Mac is now blank
- Connect your external drive from step 5 above
- Run Migration Assistant – choose to copy from the external drive, and don’t choose Applications
- Wait quite a while – the MA will restore all your data and crucially all your settings too, including passwords and software keys
- Phase 2 complete – your Mac is now fresh plus your data (and your login)
- Now start replacing your software
- Use Mac App Store to re-install anything you bought – very easy
- Mount your external drive again, you can drag and drop apps from one Applications folder to another
- Keep going until all the software you need is added back and working
I was surprised this was easier than I expected, I managed it all on a Sunday evening for 500Gb of data to shuffle around. The bit that annoyed me was this: if I click the Finder or Safari in the Dock, their windows don’t restore properly, I don’t know why, maybe it’s RightZoom, but I don’t know.
