Mac – App store thinks I have a bunch of apps installed after I reinstalled the mac

mac-appstore

I did a clean install of mountain lion using a bootable disk. Went into disk utility and erased the lion partition before the re-install.

Now when I go into the app store it thinks that all the apps that I have installed through the app store are already installed on the computer. It seems that the app store is consulting apples servers rather than my local machine so I can't install any of the apps because the buttons say the app is already installed.

How can I tell the app store that it's wrong that apps are not installed locally.

Best Answer

The App Store app only consults spotlight for your Mac to determine if an app is installed, so we can rule out any account problem (and you can sign out of the account from the store and reboot to confirm this on your system.)

So, since you have a few apps, you can focus on one app app and check spotlight to see if there are copies of it elsewhere than in /Applications.

Some helpful hints:

  • be sure to eject all disks except for the one drive you are booted from
  • consider rebuilding your spotlight index after checking for apps on other volumes by ejecting the volumes
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