So, if you’ve wiped your only hard drive in your only Mac, you may need to borrow a friend’s. Here is how to make a bootable copy of the current Mac OS (Yosemite) on a bootable usb drive. I ended up putting several ideas together to get this particular fix, which worked for me. Then, I spent a few anxious hours googling for a solution. The laptops kept me running until my little head cleared. I just shut it down and closed my office door. I was too sick at the time to even figure out how to fix it. You are, in a phrase, up the creek without a paddle. Because, you see, if said hard drive is well and truly wiped, as in wiped so thoroughly that the installer files are gone, then you, my friend, have yourself a digital blank sheet and you can’t mount it to get the App store to recognize it to format it and install the OS. On that day, you will need a bootable copy of Yosemite. I just reformatted two laptops entirely with the App store.īut sometimes, such as those times when you are feeling really lousy and taking high-powered cough meds, you may, as I did, wipe your main hard drive on your big honking desktop, thus rendering that perviously smart machine as dumb and useless as a rock. If it flops over for some reason, you can, theoretically, reinstall and even reformat from this same App store. If you want the OS, you’ve gotta download it from the App store. Photo Source: Flickr Creative Commons by USB Memory Īpple no longer ships hard copies of its OS.
