Pete's Eats

The Apple App Store is a great way of staying up to date with your apps. Not so great for the developers necessarily, as they lose revenue to Apple when you buy through the store as opposed to directly (perhaps this is balanced by greater exposure to users though…).

It also means some different ways of doing things. I’ve been a mac user for some 12+ years and I confess to not really having a clue where to start when flattening down an existing Apple machine and installing a bare copy of Lion onto it; the lack of DVD’s to install/recover from is a departure from the existing methods. I didn’t want to go to the hassle of creating a bootable USB stick etc so figured out the process a different way.

Anyway… Here’s how you can flatten a machine that has Lion installed on it, purchased from the App Store.

1) Back up/copy whatever files you want to retain, of course.
2) Restart your machine. As it restarts, hold down COMMAND and R.
3) Start Disk Utility from the top menu; select your main drive and ‘erase’ it.
4) Close Disk Utility to get back to the installer screen and select ‘install Lion’ (can’t remember the exact wording)
5) Follow the onscreen process.

Lion creates a Recover Partition when you install it for the first time. You don’t normally get to know about it’s existence, but it’s a useful way to install a fresh copy of Lion…