



With the debut of Mavericks, as with Mountain Lion and Lion, many Mac users are asking two related questions: (1) Can you perform a clean install of Mavericks? (2) Should you? Here’s my take on each of these questions, which is essentially the same as with Mountain Lion last year.Ĭan you perform a clean install of Mavericks?įirst, the technical question: Given that the OS X 10.9 installer doesn’t include an official clean-install option, is it possible to perform such an installation? The simple answer is yes. Instead of using a bootable installation DVD, you download the latest OS X installer to your Mac and install the new OS from the same drive. This feature was eliminated in the Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 installer.)īut a new download-and-install procedure debuted with Lion (OS X 10.7) and has continued through Mavericks (OS X 10.9).
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(The Mac OS X 10.2 installer debuted an Archive And Install option, which preserved your original 10.1-or problematic 10.2-installation in a special folder while installing a completely new, fresh copy of Mac OS X 10.2. For this reason, many people performed a “clean install”: wiping your hard drive (after backing it up, of course), installing the latest version of OS X, and then either using Setup/Migration Assistant to restore your applications and data, or manually reinstalling programs and copying over your data. It used to be that if you upgraded to a major new version of OS X, installing over an existing OS X installation-for example, installing 10.3 over 10.2-entailed some degree of risk, as existing applications, add-ons, and support files could conflict with the new OS.
