New macbook owner - best recovery media option?

Totality · 16 Aug 2014 at 12:30

Hi all,

Picked up a macbook air 2014 model and all good so far. Doesn't come with any recovery media so assume that to restore it the macbook has a recovery partition on the SSD, but what if the SSD is infected and a full restore is needed?

Are you able to download OS X Mavericks on a seperate machine as an ISO and create a bootable USB stick like with Windows, or do you need to create a recovery USB whilst the Macbook is new as you cannot download an ISO? What is the best option? All I want is a way to restore the OS to blank and new if the recovery on HDD becomes broken for whatever reason.

Cheers

bloodiedathame · 16 Aug 2014 at 14:27

You'll be able to restore over the network, no recovery media necessary. However for speed I tend to clone the hard drive to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (which creates a bootable external clone).

lamboman · 16 Aug 2014 at 23:03

Apple include the createinstallmedia utility in their installers now. Works the same way for Yosemite: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5856

I'd recommend keeping a USB stick on hand in case you want to install from scratch (completely wiping the drive).

BunnyKillBot · 20 Aug 2014 at 11:16

OP, if you turn on the computer with no, or a fresh hard drive, it will connect to the internet (wifi or ethernet, probably), and stream the standard recovery environment in to RAM. From there, you can re-partition the disk and install the version of OSX the computer came with, or restore a backup, or what ever.

Totality · 22 Aug 2014 at 04:39

Cheers - the internet recovery worked after bootcamp messed up the partitions on the disk! Downloaded from Command + R and reinstalled itself. Will create a USB restore at some point too incase I am ever away from internet!