Formatting My MacBook Air

joshua1

Since I have found someone to buy my MacBook Air (thanks dad!) so i can confidently buy a 15" MBpro, (fuck yes!) without feeling too guilty.

All i need now is to format this once proud beast.

Without a Superdrive.

I am assuming this CAN be done. Right?

Linden

Remote Install is, from what I've seen, your friend here. You'll need a network connection to another machine, and the Air's install disk. From there, Disk Utility should be accessible, allowing formatting, and you'll have access to the installation media. It's certainly possible to install (and reformat) without the actual disk present in the drive, though - netbooting is a useful tool in quite a few places.

joshua1

eurgh. Just hit an annoying snag.

Dragged out the disk, managed to boot off the disk in the network (which took ages), only to have the installer claim "can't install OSX on this disk" with no other message.

Any idea what that might be?

Linden

Yeah, netbooting takes forever.
My first guess is that your partition map scheme is incorrect - Intel Macs require the GUID Partition Scheme. You should be able to check this from the netbooted version of Disk Utility, or with diskutil info run on the appropriate disk from the command line. I'd use Disk Utility, and if it's not reporting GUID, reformat. You may want to use the 'erase' option.

(for this, select the actual disk, and get info. Mine registers as "TOSHIBA *blech* Media", for instance)

details

joshua1

Trawling the 'trons, I came up with a possible simple solution. It is most likely the disk im using.

I was booting off my iMac's OSX disk.

I have found the correct disc now, and will try it again tonight.

Just another quick question: Im not really interested in backing up any of the Apps on that machine, but my paranoid self has copied my homefolder to my wireless HD. This should have covered all of the assorted riff raff that accumulates with normal use? I mean, i haven't tired to squirell anything away, just saving into one of the home folders as well as sub-folders. This should be all the 'meat' with out the accessory file dross, right?

Linden

Ah, yes, that would be a problem. Good luck.
And yes, /Users/username should contain the vast majority of stuff. You could lose a few things, but they're not likely to be real issues. That said, you could run into permission troubles at first - but they're easy enough to fix.

This is part of why Time Machine is actually quite nice to maintain (some issues with disc images aside)

joshua1

Eugh, that reminds me.

That machine has been backing up to the time machine. When i get my new MB, how should i delete tthe Air machine from from it?

Linden

First off, you should know that you can actually restore a system from a Time Machine backup - you might want to do this, unless you have some reason not to. Secondly, the backups are kept in a folder named Backups.backupd in the disk root. Select, delete - Time Machine is essentially treating it as dumb storage.

As a side note, this could be... time-consuming. Careful use of rm at command line might be faster here, but no guarantees.

joshua1

Eh, i have the time.

I was thinking of not migrating that image onto my new machine purely for

"that clean install feeling"

If you can dig?

Although, i might hide an recent image for when I invariably fuck something up.