How to reinstall Mac OS: practical tips

The MacOS X operating system is Apple's own development and is installed on all computers of its production. Thanks to tight integration and hardware, it is characterized by high stability and performance. Once a year a new version of this OS is released, and during the period of its service updates are regularly issued, aimed at correcting detected errors. How to reinstall Mac OS X on your computer, and what installation options are available, we'll cover in this material.

Terms of distribution

Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system, the first version of which was released in 2001. For the next twelve years, it was distributed on a fee basis, and all its versions were "cat names". The first in this series was OS 10.0 "Gepard", the latter - 10.8 "Mountain Lion".

Starting with version 10.9, MacOS is distributed free of charge, and codenames have been assigned to geographic sites located in the state of California. The first operating system in this series was released in 2013 and named Mavericks, in honor of the popular Californian beach.

In 2016, Apple changed one of the items of the license agreement with users. MacOS has since been considered not purchased, but taken from the company for rent while using its equipment. However, this change is more relevant to those users who use the so-called Hackintosh, the installation of MacOS on a third-party computer.

Update from the App Store

The easiest way to install a new version is to download it from the App Store. Let's see what will be done in this case and how. You can reinstall Mac OS X in this way on any Apple computer, the hardware part of which will support the latest version of the operating system.

The download requires a working OS and Internet access. On the App Store homepage, in the "Quick Links" section, the very first version of the Mac OS available for your computer will be the very first. Go to the operating system page, select the "Download" option, and in the "Applications" folder you have its image with the name "Install Mac OS", the current build number and an indicator showing the progress of downloading it from the company's servers.

After receiving the image on the computer, it will only be run as a normal program. In the future, without your participation, there will be several reboots, and you can use the latest operating system Apple.

Installation from the recovery partition

Over time, the requirements for "hardware" are growing, and even if your laptop officially supports the new version, on the old one it can work more efficiently. Let's look at how to reinstall the Mac OS on a MacBook without changing the OS to a newer one. In this case, we will also need a connection to the "World Wide Web".

At the time of loading, you must use the keyboard combination Command + R. With it, you get to the recovery menu and choose how to reinstall the Mac OS. You will be able to update to the latest supported version or to the latest version used. Choosing the second option, you actually set back the OS on which your laptop showed great performance.

When using the recovery function, it is also possible to return the version of the operating system from which you purchased the computer. If you decide to perform this operation, you will need to use a more complex key combination at the initial stage of the boot. While holding Shift + Command + Option + R and answering the question about how to reinstall Mac OS, select the installation option that came with it.

Installing from a USB flash drive

After the release of new versions of Apple OS, to activate all available features, you may need a "clean" installation. In this case, you need to know how to reinstall the Mac OS from scratch using a bootable USB flash drive. This option is not much more difficult than the previous ones, and the only thing you need is an external drive with a size of at least 8 GB and named Untitled. You can rename it using Disk Utility from the OS.

To begin with, you will need to download the boot image to your computer in the manner described above. Once it is received, you can start creating your own bootable USB flash drive. We will only use the standard tools of the operating system itself and create an installation disk using the "Terminal" program. Copy the following command to its window:

Sudo / Applications / Install \ macOS \ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume / Volumes / Untitled --applicationpath / Applications / Install \ macOS \ Sierra.app --nointeraction

To perform this, you will need an administrator account or knowledge of the administrative password. If before you followed our recommendations exactly, after more than half an hour you will have an installation disc with the latest version of OS X Sierra.

Finally

From this material, you learned how to reinstall the Mac OS on your computer, and what are the options for doing this task. As you can see, the process of reinstalling the "apple" operating system is quite simple and most of the time you will have to download its image. Having coped with this task, you can consider yourself a real makovod.