I think there is a big distinction to be drawn between "erasing the disk"
and "erasing the OS partition". If you look in disk utility in the "selected
disks table", you'll see something very cryptic looking at the top of the
table, and that's the actual physical disk drive unit. On my machine it is
listed as "500.12 GB ST3400418AS Media". VO will say "500.12 GB ST3400418AS
Media, contains two items", and that makes sense because I have two
partitions on the physical internal disk drive. under that you'll find
"macintosh HD". That is the partition on the disk that contains the Os. and
In my case there is a second entry for my bootcamp partition. Then, there
are additional entries in the table for any external hard drives with their
partitions and a CD drive if you have one.
I think, and notice I didn't say "I know", I think that erasing the physical
disk will erase everything on it including all partitions, but erasing a
partition confines the erasure to that section of disk.
When I reinstalled Mountain Lion a few days ago, I erased the partition
"MacintoshHD", and then reinstalled ML into that partition.
I believe that the recovery partition on the physical drive is just that, a
partition, and as such is seperate from the MacintoshHD partition. I say
this because it is listed as a boot option in the boot select screen along
with options for MacHD, and Bootcamp, and my external boot image. For that
reason I think its a seperate partition. Therefore, erasing the MacHD
partition does not affect the recovery partition, and so, working from
within the recovery partition, you are free to erase MacHD and then
reinstall ML.
You do this by selecting "disk utility" from the recovery screen menu, erase
your OS partition, Close disk utility and from the menu, select Install Mac
OS X. You'll be prompted for which partition you want to install ML, and of
course, you need to make sure and select the partition you just erased.
Having said this, I was not so brave as to act on my belief, and instead
created a USB thumbdrive with the Mountain Lion installer and the OS
utilities on it. I booted into that USB device and did all my erasing and
reinstalling from that device.
As with anything else you hear on the internet, I strongly urge you to take
my words with a grain of salt, investigate for yourself and come to your own
conclusions before acting.
If you want instructions for creating a USB thumbdrive installer, Daniel
Chavez did a podcast on the entire subject of doing a clean install of
Mountain Lion from a USB thumbdrive. Here's his website:
www.danielcproductions.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "Krister Ekstrom" <kris...@kristersplace.com>
To: <macvisionaries@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 7:06 AM
Subject: Re: A somewhat geeky question about partitioning the internal hard
drive
Is it only me who's utterly stupid, but to me this doesn't make sence at
all. Ok, so i erase the hard drive, and the recovery partition will be
erased as well, that's logical, but assuming i want to erase and format the
mac from the recovery partition, how do i then go about to install the os,
or is it a question that the app asks when formating and erasing?Or do i
have to repoot from a bootable drive somewhere and install from there? I am
totally and utterly confused.
/Krister
12 jan 2013 kl. 02:30 skrev Daniel C <topdog2...@gmail.com>:
It does make sense yes. But unless you really need the space it wouldn't
harm anything to keep the Mac recovery HD.
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