After that, you’ll be able to rock the new freshly installed OS X. It can take a while, might want to play some Angry Birds for a while or grab a beer!Īfter the reinstall, you or the new owner will need to go through the setup process, transfer files, connect to WiFi…etc. You’re Mac will restart a few times automatically while everything is erased and reinstalled. Now you can kick back and wait while OS X reinstalls. If you only have one drive, it will be selected for you automatically.īefore OS X installs, you’ll need to log in to your Apple Account. Now agree to the terms of service for the software license.Īfter that select the hard drive you want to install OS X on. Click Continue at the bottom, and on the message that comes up, click the Continue button. Next you’ll get the OS X Mountain Lion screen. Reinstall Apple OS X Mountain LionĪfter that’s done, go back to OS X Utilities and this time highlight Reinstall OS X and click Continue. This does a similar job of securely erasing your drive as DBAN for Windows. If you want to be extra secure, select Security Options, then select 7-Pass Erase, which meets the US Department of Defense 5220-22 M standard. That will erase all data and reformat the hard disk. Select the local drive and click the Erase tab, Format should be set to Mac OS Extended (journaled), the click the Erase button. Start your Mac and hold down the Command + R key combination. Updated December 2019: Everything is up to date through macOS Catalina.Note: I started by selling my iPad 3, and if you’re selling yours, check out my article on how to erase your data and reset it. If you have any more questions about reinstalling macOS on your Mac, let us know in the comments. How to set up and customize your Mac from scratch Questions? If you're starting from scratch, you'll need to set up your Mac from scratch. Your Mac will now go through the normal macOS installation process, eventually restarting.

Enter your Apple ID and password if you're asked to, though you might not be.

Click on the drive on which you wish to install macOS.

How to reinstall macOS while in Recovery mode

If you're running macOS High Sierra or later on a Mac with an SSD, your choices will be some form of APFS. Click on the format you want to use for your drive. Even though your Mac cant boot to the desktop and you cant open Disk Utility through Finder, you can use Disk Utility.Click on your startup disk in the Disk Utility sidebar.

Mac boots to os x utilities