MacOS – Why does Network Restore on the MacBook Air 2012 give me Mountain Lion, not Mavericks

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I recently upgraded the SSD of my MacBook Air 2012

Very happy with the Network Restore. Hold CMD+R on start-up, use disk utility to format, and then network restore OSX.

But why does it only offer Mountain Lion?

I then have to upgrade to Mavericks using the App Store.

Which isn't painful, but why couldn't I just restore to Mavericks in the first place?

Best Answer

Internet Recovery will only download the original version of OS X that came with the computer. This is not configurable.

Back when Internet Recovery was released, OS X updates weren't free, so Internet Recovery didn't know if you paid for the upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion. Therefore it was easiest to just install the original OS X, and then make the user update afterwards.

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MacOS – How to install Mountain Lion on a disk that cannot be formatted in recovery mode

You should be able to use dd to destroy the partition's header. You can then format (erase) it and run the install.

From the installer run Terminal and type the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0s2 bs=1024 count=1024

Do be warned, this will irrecoverably destroy all data on that partition. But it looks like that's what you're expecting. Make sure you don't accidentally target the wrong thing.

Also note that I haven't done this, exactly. I've used this technique to destroy the entire partition table, not just a single partition. But I think it should work.

When you're done quit Terminal and run Disk Utility. You won't get any complaints about Core Storage.

MacOS – How to diagnose why I can no longer access certain sites on certain networks since I upgraded to Mountain Lion

When I've had this issue in the past, like the two day period when I couldn't access Flickr from my laptop but I could from other machines, the solution was to flush the DNS Cache: essentially a small database on your machine that can help (or so my understanding) speed up network access.

According to the latest Apple Support document on this, the command is:

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5343

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to install Mountain Lion on a disk that cannot be formatted in recovery mode

MacOS – How to diagnose why I can no longer access certain sites on certain networks since I upgraded to Mountain Lion

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